Bee's Knees

If you had shown me this site in 2005 I would have asked you if had checked your virus software lately, because this looks like a bad one. I would have clicked away so fast it would give you whiplash. Looking at these sites now, I have to convince myself that they aren't virus laden sites and fight against the pavlovian urge to just navigate away.

I navigate away anyways because fuck them, there's usually a better site (though they are dwindling quickly). I still can't get over how the internet "as intended" today looks like a malware ridden fever dream from 20 years ago. This is every story I've ever read about an empire that used to be great and has now fallen into turmoil.

This touched a nerve lol everyone is big mad in the notes

That and also having a pool of reserve labor, and I’m sure something also about military enrollment to a certain degree. Well I guess these all boil down to cheap labor actually! Weird huh

is my human suffering sexy enough for you, God? is it getting you off king 

[ID: Le Guin: Well, to preach that story is conflict, always to ask “where’s the conflict in your story?” —this needs some thinking about. If you say that story is about conflict, that plot must be based on conflict, you’re limiting your view of the world severely. And in a sense making a political statement: that life is conflict, so in stories conflict is all that really matters. This is simply untrue. To see life as a battle is a narrow, Social-Darwinist view, and a very masculine one. Conflict, of course, is part of life, I’m not saying you should try to keep it out of your stories, just that it’s not their only lifeblood. Stories are about a lot of different things.]

the funniest thing in arguments about economics is when someone tries to convince you cavemen were actually mini-capitalists and trading items was the free market or something so capitalism is human nature

caveman economy in shambles after grug crashes the rock market

I thought this was my hometown for a second

So this has actually been cited by academics as part of the major draw to online spaces is the fact that just existing in public is reacted to with hostility and punishment. Gretchen McCulloch discussed this is in her book Because Internet, citing research that shows teens and young adults want to be outside! We want to spend time in social places, it’s just that there aren’t any places to exist in public without being charged for it.

imagine being the woman at the end of 50 first dates and you wake up heavily pregnant with no memory of how you got there and all you have there is a dvd that tells you you’re married now and have been for the last five years. literally a horror movie premise

oh and it’s to adam sandler. you find out via saw dvd that you’re having adam sandler’s baby

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he wasn’t even there to be a contestant he joined the crew as a CHINESE TEACHER but the directors noticed his good looks and begged him to compete. poor guy made it to the finals and if he had been one of the winners he would have been contractually forced to be in a boy band whether he wanted to or not

this is the closest any human being has ever come to actually being sold to One Direction

i cannot for the life of me find that essay about how sterilized, approachable, “nice” literature was used in victorian england to create a cultural imaginary that wholeheartedly ignored the atrocities being committed by the state, but every time i see someone sincerely make the argument that escapist stories are the only moral form of storytelling it rings in my head like a bell. it haunts me. some of y’all actually think that wide-scale erasure is better that attempting to grapple with messy reality in fiction and it’s honestly so exhausting

ALSO can we stop evaluating stories solely based on their utility? Please? there is more to a narrative than whether it’s “harmful” or not, and it’ll be way better in the long run to be able to understand what the ideas being communicated are and how they’re communicated than sticking to just whether or not they’re objectively and universally Good. 

and every time we kiss i swear i could fly