Translated thoughts

He did a wonderful job, but as he was returning my plant to my custody, he explained "I watered her every other day, I gave her new dirt, moved her into the sunshine, prayed the rosary-"

"What?"

He looked at me, confused. "Isn't she a plant you pray with?"

"No," I said slowly. "She's a prayer plant. That's the... colloquial name of the plant."

Upon seeing his stricken face, I realized something went wrong. Turns out, this entire time, he's been including my plant in on his prayers and leaving her near icons.

Behold, Dorothea

He turned to me, sighed, and said in a very deadpan tone-- "Plants don't have covenants, Joy,"

It started with someone listing "places with uncanny energy," like gas stations on a road trip, empty movie theaters, etc.

Then someone reblogged it and said those are called "liminal spaces," defining liminal as in-between, neither one thing nor another.

Tomorrow (July 4th, 2026) is the 10 year anniversary of the-crepes-of-wrath's comment, which:

Predates the 2020 spike in interest by four years

Predates the original backrooms post, and the the creation of r/liminalspaces by three years

Predates the earliest mention that KnowYourMeme attributes to Twitter by two years

I'm pretty sure this is the moment the term "liminal spaces" was attached to this sort of imagery, and it's TEN YEARS OLD TOMORROW!

ok brief context first for any readers not aware: in the Odyssey, the unfaithful maids are a group of enslaved women in the house of Odysseus who are hanged for 'betraying' Odysseus by having sex with Penelope's suitors. In the Penelopiad they are instead Penelope's most faithful and trusted maids who she enlisted to spy on the suitors.

my issue w the Penelopiad on this subject is just that I think making it so the maids weren't actually 'unfaithful' carries the implication that if they had done all the things the Odyssey says they did then in some sense they would have had it coming.

yeah I haven't seen the Nolan film but i read the summary bcos i was interested to see if they kept in the Unfaithful Maids and not only are they out but the film also seems to have really played down the massacre of the suitors?

which is another thing where like, even in the original context, we are not supposed to 100% agree with that!! its followed by a sequence where the suitors' families are all like 'dude what the fuck'

part of the emotional impact, to me, of the Odyssey is that we spent the whole epic being encouraged to sympathise w Odysseus as this almost everyman-type main character who just wants to go home and then at the end of the poem he murders a bunch of people. yikes!!

EVEN PARENTS ARE SUPPOSED TO ENCOURAGE RESPONSIBLE READING/VIEWING BEHAVIOR. NOT filter everything ahead of time for their kid.

When my kiddo was 5, his pediatrician was asking him the usual Well Child Visit questions (“What are your favorite foods? What do you do to get your body moving? Do you know what to do if you get lost in a public place?” Etc.) and she asked, “What do you do if you see something on TV that scares or upsets you?”

I piped up like, “Oh, he doesn’t watch TV without one of us in the room,” which was true at the time and is still largely true now. She said, “Yes, but that won’t always be the case, so make sure you’re talking to him about what to do if he sees something that upsets him.”

So we started talking to him about that, and the answer is simple: “Turn it off or leave the room, and talk to someone you trust about what you saw and what you’re feeling.”

The answer is NOT “Ask your parents to make sure you never see anything upsetting again,” because that’s just not possible — and ultimately that would be doing the kid a disservice, since sooner or later he’s going to be out in the world where we can’t control what he watches or reads. That doesn’t mean we don’t try to make sure he’s watching/reading age-appropriate stuff, it just means that’s not the only safeguard he has — and that’s a good thing.

So yes, content creators aren’t your parents and aren’t responsible for making sure you never see anything you don’t like — but also, your own parents should have taught you what to do when that happens. So if they didn’t, take it from me, your internet mom:

Turn it off.

Walk away.

Talk to someone you trust about how you’re feeling.

skinny people please reblog this one

if you are in a public building and you see a fire start, leave. that's it.

do not wait to see if someone puts it out with an extinguisher. do not spend time gathering your things.

the very second you see flames, move quickly and calmly to the nearest exit. you don't have time to do anything else.

i see comments on articles about mass casualty/fatality fires, and people are confused about how so many people died despite having available exits and the fire starting small. many people don't understand what a 'flashover' is. when objects burn in a room, they emit toxic gases, which can themselves ignite.

at a point (even within minutes of the fire starting), the entire room reaches such a high temperature that everything (and everyone) simultaneously and spontaneously ignites. even things that are not near to/directly in contact with the flames.

this is an extremely unlikely scenario to survive. even before/without a flashover, the heat and toxic smoke are already lethal (this is what killed my father. the room he was in never even caught fire. he suffered no burns). it is not like in movies where there's fire in door frames and on ceilings that you can maneuver around on-foot.

You can watch demonstrations of flashover events to truly understand the urgency of evacuating when you see an indoor fire.

This is a fire when it starts in a small waste bin in the corner of the room:

this is Three Minutes later:

How long is three minutes, really? How long will it take you to get to the exit? You don't have time to grab your things, to take a video.

You don't have time to look around and wait to see what everyone else is going to do. Exit. Quickly. Calmly. If you see someone near you who may need assistance that you can offer, bring them with you. Move.

If the fire is brought under control, you can easily go back inside once the situation is safe. You're not overreacting. People do and have died because they underestimate small indoor fires. They wait to see what will happen, whether it can be put out, what other people will do. Then it's too late.

When you go somewhere new, take a moment to locate the nearest exits. (in older buildings, if the emergency exit doors aren't alarmed, I sometimes even check to make sure they actually open, if I have the chance. sometimes they're locked.) If you or someone with you is disabled in a way which requires extra time moving and exiting (I sometime use a wheelchair), consider this in your exit route as best as you can.

Above all: Know your way out. Have a plan. Both help you stay calm and escape.

"Good Morning, Rose"

Something like Breaking Bad, for example, has low squiggability (that’s what I’m calling this quality). It’s tightly written, the characters are consistent, there’s little left to interpolate or extrapolate. Obviously, people DO write fanfic of Breaking Bad, but it still has a low squiggability score. Whereas something like Supernatural has a high squiggability score. Fantasy and science fiction often have high squiggability scores. This suggests squiggability could also be related to worldbuilding and potential for people to borrow a premise or setting.