The Incurable Bookwyrm

I have heard a variant on it that I really like: "You cannot hate yourself into someone you can love."

Nature really went off with sperm whales. A 70-ton predator with teeth the size of a banana but it only eats squishy prey that it doesn’t even chew, it just schlorps them down whole like a vacuum cleaner. Big giant fat head full of goop. Tiniest fins in the world. Strong enough to smash a ship to pieces and smart enough to figure out how to do so but its first line of defense is just to shit everywhere. Possibly the most complex language in the animal kingdom and it creates sounds by blowing air through its internal right nostril (it uses the left one to breathe) into its giant fat head. It’s the loudest animal on the planet and might have the capability to create a beam of sound so loud it can shake your organs apart but they don’t seem to use that to hunt or fight. They’re highly flammable. We used them to make candles.

Learning that sperm whales have defensive diarrhea is absolutely incredible. On par with turkey vultures projectile vomiting decayed flesh and bone-melting acid as a defense. I want to be able to do this to catcallers. Why can't I melt the faces of predators with stomach acid. Why can't i force predators to breathe my feces. I want to be on this level.

You're an ape, you evolved to pick up and throw small objects. I'm sure you can extrapolate.

You are so right and empowering

let’s talk about how they made it impossible to function without a phone and digitalised everything and then turned around and went “actually! these phone things aren’t safe for kids but it’s magically ok once you’re eighteen. guess you’ll have to have your life dictated by your parents now lol cause we’re gonna take the devices away from you. IT’S FOR YOUR OWN GOOD WHY ARE YOU COMPLAINING”

ok my apologies. take away my ability to buy anything too ig because these fuckass stores don’t accept cash anymore. take away my ability to communicate with people outside my house and school because I can’t text and I can’t email and I cant drive to them either and I can’t even fucking get public transport without a phone either. can’t order at a fucking restaurant without being asked to get a membership and install an app and also very sorry but you can only order through our online menu now! have you ever considered that it’s not just about instagram?

The only thing — not man, animal, insect, plant, or machine — that demands no rest is capitalism

my most old person take is that i think the prose of most contemporary fiction is unreadable. every sentence. is so short. and punchy. and you can never. get pulled into. the flow of the story. because it feels like. you're being pelted. with tiny pebbles of sentences. and i hate it.

Here's an idea about why kids are so anxious and depressed all the time...the environments kids are in most of the time are very stressful and don't fulfill their needs for play, rest, proper variety of foods, positive social opportunities, and freedom from fear pain punishment etc

Strictly speaking, "ultimate" means "last", not "best". It's often figuratively employed in the latter sense to suggest that the thing so described is the final word on the subject, after which nothing more need be said, but if we're being real technical, describing a game or movie that was so bad it killed its entire franchise as the "ultimate" is in fact correct.

Friendly reminder that the leather flag predates almost every other flag. We owe this community to leather daddies and kinksters

In the era of corporate sanitization never forget it was leather daddies and S&M folks who protected some of the earliest pride parades.

Three years after that last comment and the corporate backers are fleeing as the moment the political tide turned - the kinksters aren’t.

A character trait/dynamic that I'm endlessly compelled by is someone dealing with (or, like, failing to) being the child of people who were too busy being good people to have the time and attention to be good parents. This can be anywhere from 'was a public defender who gave a shit working 60 hour weeks with basically no vacations' to 'left their family behind to join the revolution/war effort and is now a universally beloved martyr-hero who saved/remade the world with their final breath' on the groundedness spectrum. The important thing is a viscerally felt but confused and ugly mess of longing, resentment, and guilt about feeling the resentment.

I also, perhaps controversially, am of the opinion that more odyssey adaptations should retain the hanging of the unfaithful maids

The only adaptation I'm aware of to engage w the hanging of the unfaithful maids is Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad and I actually really didn't like the way she handled it

do you ever feel yourself fail a charisma check in real time

not only are most people completely unaware of the devastation of indigenous languages in the americas, most people are completely unaware of the devastation of indigenous languages in europe. never mind occitan, they don't know about basque! it's wild! bleak! existentially horrifying!!!

did you know france has celtic languages? breton is the only celtic language spoken outside of the british isles. did you know france has germanic languages? alsatian, for example, is spoken in the east of france, unsurprisingly in alsace. it's not even the only french germanic language. did you know france has a number of languages and dialects known as langues d'oïl closely related to french? norman and picard, for example, are spoken in the north of france. did you know that france has gallo-romance languages? franco-provençal (which has a number of dialects) is spoken in the east of france, as well as parts of switzerland and italy. did you know that france has a language most closely related to catalan, the langues d'oc? occitan is spoken in the south of france and has a rich literary history. did you know france is home to basque, or rather euskara, a language isolate which predates indo-european languages? romani dialects! corsican! so much more than just french! there are even extinct jewish dialects of occitan! extinct langues d'oïl like angevin! so much linguistic diversity and all anyone talks about is french.