Laurel Tree

the sewing machine is like if a horse and an inkjet printer had a child

Just a casual reminder that posting on the internet about how you would want to do physical harm to members of the US government is something that they can (and will) detain you over, so just be careful what you say in public spaces like, uh, on Tumblr.

this is your semi-regular reminder that tumblr has cooperated with the fbi to hand over user information in a very public way at least once. and that's not the only way the feds can collect information on you either

[looking at people younger than me] you have your whole life ahead of you [looking at people older than me] you have your whole life ahead of you [looking at myself] its over

labubu was meant to be hanging off a kindergartners backpack filthy as fuck with no eyes left

Girl who's like "oh but I don't want to be the one who says no to everything all the time" vs environment that routinely asks for lots of her time to be spent on things she gets nothing out of when she's already struggling to keep up with the stuff she actually likes.

"Don't just say no to everything" is useful advice if you're missing out on new experiences and getting stuck in your comfort zone but it stops being useful when it results in a situation where you can reliably be talked into doing stuff you know you don't want to if someone just nags you about it

The little voice saying "just this one time can't hurt" is lying to you because it's not just going to be the one time, the one time is going to set a precedent that will lead to more times. The word no exists for a reason. Use it.

I hope you get your favorite food this week and your favorite drink and your favorite 2k dollars

I'm sorry there's no magic in this post I'm just talking. I hope good stuff happens to people online I hope good things happen to all of us

I guess the reason all that Backrooms stuff has never really fazed me is because I worked in on-site networking support for a while, and literally every city's downtown district is just Like That once you get off the beaten path. Not just the really big cities, either; the one I'm currently living in has a population of less than 250 000 – metro area included – and a downtown area about six blocks across, and the service corridors still manage to do some House of Leaves shit. At one point I was trying to map the route of a misbehaving network cable, started out in a shopping mall parking garage, and ended up surfacing in the basement of the casino across the street. Totally unsecured – apparently neither the mall's administration nor the casino's managers knew that particular service corridor existed.

Like, I once bumped into a fully stocked and operational Coke machine in an unlit maintenance corridor twenty feet below ground level. Its display lighting was the only illumination for a hundred yards in either direction. I don't even know what it was plugged into.

Somewhere below this city there's a room the size of a high school gymnasium filled floor to ceiling with rotting mattresses. I've seen it with my own eyes – and, more importantly, smelled it with my own nose. I can't recommend the experience.

(That last one isn't even mysterious. The room in question is within easy walking distance of the basement of a major hotel, if you know where you're going; I imagine the hotel started stashing their old mattresses there at some point rather than pay to have them hauled away, and over the ensuing decades the situation got out of hand.)

This only works with private student loans NOT FEDERAL!!!! The government has the right to transfer your student loans between contracted servicer's per your MPN

So what? Are you too good to see Oprah's Device?

don't be mean to yourself that's you

you live there

There's a recurring online tendency to aestheticize consensus itself. The imagined future village is full of emotionally compatible people who enjoy communal gardening, conflict resolution circles, acoustic folk music, mutual aid potlucks, and repairing bicycles together at sunset. Which is nice for the people who genuinely enjoy that lifestyle. But plenty of humans are solitary, prickly, obsessive, urban, nocturnal, sensory-seeking, technologically attached, contrarian, novelty-seeking, private, or just plain difficult. Those people do not evaporate after the revolution. They do not get Left Behind while you are Raptured into the Utopia. They become your neighbors.

The part about it being envisioned specifically as a "village" is relevant, I think, in that these kinds of people romanticize small rural villages as this ideal form of close-knit community to which we must retvrn, in contrast to the hard, alienating city life. But I'd argue that sure, dense urban environments can be alienating in certain ways, but they're also in many ways more utopian simply in that they force people to learn to peacefully co-exist as a community with others very different from themselves. The rural village appears to live in idyllic consensus because everyone who did not fit in has either been ostracized away, worn down into conformity, or has voluntarily fled to the nearest big city as soon as they were old enough.

the utopian character of the city is not only in that it teaches coexistence but also in that it fosters the development of communities within its community. a city is a thousand villages you can visit and join and leave without abandoning the comforts of your home and the stability of your lifestyle and the fundamental sense that you still ultimately belong. you can have even more tightly knit communities of maximally compatible people when more people have the opportunity to self-select and be accepted into them, and to self-select out of them without the coercive force of exclusion from your entire societal context. you can also have looser communities that benefit their members without them having to holistically get along with each other! people can be in multiple of both of these at the same time!! social butterflies can flourish to the greatest extent their own bodies and brains can handle, and the most closed-off self-sufficient loner in the world can still benefit from cooperation without it being predicated on connection. the community of the city itself is simply that of sharing space, but sharing space means sharing the myriad resources and opportunities that occupy it