Rest in peace to the incredible Anthony Stewart Head (20th February 1954 - 1st June 2026)
RUPERT GILES in BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (1997-2003)
Cosmic Funnies
RMH
Xuebing Du
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸

Origami Around

shark vs the universe
Mike Driver

Love Begins
Keni
🪼
almost home

if i look back, i am lost
KIROKAZE
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
TVSTRANGERTHINGS

occasionally subtle
Monterey Bay Aquarium

seen from United States
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seen from United States
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seen from Türkiye
seen from United Kingdom

seen from Belgium

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seen from Türkiye

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@othervee
Rest in peace to the incredible Anthony Stewart Head (20th February 1954 - 1st June 2026)
RUPERT GILES in BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (1997-2003)

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RIP Anthony Stewart Head (1954 - 2026)
The thing is, in order to have a healthy and robust fandom, a piece of media NEEDS to leave some questions unanswered. Some relations unshipped. Some plot holes unfilled. Some backstories unwritten. Some lore unexplained. You need possibilities that will keep people up at night. The beautiful thing about an empty lot in a neighborhood is what people make in it
Happy Pride!
Every pride, you must reblog this. No exceptions
Anyone gonna mention how this guy actually preformed live with Carly Rae Jepsen?
I’m gonna scream is2g
I was thinking of reblogging this again just because the original video is still amazing, but then I see the second video and lost my mind. The upgraded fan, the body glitter, the sheer fact that he got to do this with the actual singer.
“Rich kids should go to public schools. The mayor should ride the subway to work. When wealthy people get sick, they should be sent to public hospitals. Business executives should have to stand in the same airport security lines as everyone else. The very fact that people want to buy their way out of all of these experiences points to the reason why they shouldn’t be able to. Private schools and private limos and private doctors and private security are all pressure release valves that eliminate the friction that would cause powerful people to call for all of these bad things to get better. The degree to which we allow the rich to insulate themselves from the unpleasant reality that others are forced to experience is directly related to how long that reality is allowed to stay unpleasant. When they are left with no other option, rich people will force improvement in public systems. Their public spirit will be infinitely less urgent when they are contemplating these things from afar than when they are sitting in a hot ER waiting room for six hours themselves.”
— Everyone Into The Grinder

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the best fanfiction you've ever read was written by a woman in her 40s before she made dinner for her kids. it was written by a teenager after school when they should've been studying for a history test. and a barista came up with the idea while they cleaned the espresso machine and busser fact-checked it on their break and the post-doc edited between writing grant proposals and the nurse apologized for typos in the notes after a long shift and behind every drabble and one-shot and multi-chapter fic there is a person with a wonderful and interesting and chaotic life and it is such a privilege that we get to be apart of it because they decided to do this thing we all share, for fun.
this is from "research as a leisure activity" by celine nguyen, publs. on stubstack in 2024. it's a very good read
People can handle evil characters(for the most part--usually they twist their behavior and water it down) but people really can't handle good characters that lose their head or lose themselves and have a moment of fallen grace. Fandom has shown this time and time again. They really look at them as worse than the initial evil.
related but tangential. there's a really strong unexamined belief throughout a lot of fandom -- and population outside of fandom, but we're talking about fandom here -- that what you do and say during your worst moments is who you really are.
And the assumptions underlying this, more or less, break down to:
Everybody is secretly bad deep down. They're born that way (no, this is not original sin, wdym, it's just an Honest and Realistic assessment of human nature!) and have to be taught to cover it up through childhood with facades of politeness. Everybody is lying all the time by pretending to be better or nicer than they really are, and this facade takes active effort to maintain. When the effort drops and the facade slips, the true underlying rottenness shows through.
All actions taken are rational and reasoned, at all times. Lying is always a deliberate, purposeful action meant to advance a person's aims and goals. There is never any reason to lie except to make yourself look good. Therefore, any good or nice statement or action may be a lie, but any bad or harmful statement or action must be true.
Ergo: anything a person (or a character) says or does when in states of emotional extremity, overwhelming grief, incapacitating pain, exhaustion, illness, head injury, is Peeling Back the Facade of Goodness to reveal the True Rottenness Underneath.
This is, of course, utter nonsense. But an amazing number of people seem to believe it.
every day i am percieved™️
There is a reason for this though!
The original tweet summarizes it pretty well. Fanfic tends to be popular among certain types of neurodivergent people (aka people most likely to read excessively as a child, and have burnout as an adult) for the same reasons that we tend to hyperfixate–neurochemical signaling (I hope I’m using that phrase correctly). What I mean is, for people who are really dependent on changes in dopamine/serotonin/neurotransmitter levels, who have low levels or wonky neural reward systems (perhaps the most common types of neurodivergence)…people like us rely on dependable external sources of those neurochemicals. In order to function, we spend a lot of our free time trying to level out our brain chemistry using things that can reliably bring us a steady stream of joyful moments (rewards) without costing too much of the mental effort that is already in short supply.
significantly: the investment of reading has to be balanced with a steady “return on investment”–and this return has to start fairly quickly. because again, we don’t have a lot of attention/energy to invest on tiring things. we have perpetual “low batteries” in that regard.
that doesn’t mean these stories are “simple,” or that they lack complexity or value–only that the reward has to come in short regular intervals, and it has to have a low “upfront cost.” these stories are only “easy” to read in the sense that the effort we put into them is rewarded in a timely manner. which is why fanfic stories are so perfectly formulated for neurodivergent readers–they are often beautifully written, but skip a lot of the upfront costs (of introducing new characters, of world-building, of getting the audience emotionally connected to the story elements).
the nature of fanfiction is that the reader has a pre-existing relationship with this world and these characters. that–combined with the shorter average length of fics–means that fan fics very quickly start rewarding the reader in a way that traditional fiction struggles to. that’s not a bad thing! and maybe it’s something more traditionally published writers should be paying attention to.
Fanfic, as a genre, has been uniquely helpful and accessible to many neurodivergent readers who would otherwise struggle to immerse themselves in stories. I’m glad so many of you have found a way to love and enjoy reading again! The important thing is that you are spending time inside stories you love–the way those stories are published or presented to the world is just one detail. The fact that you find joy in the process of reading (or listening!) to stories–that is what matters.
I feel understood 🥰
a bunch of people have reblogged this with the default “i feel called out” reaction….and i know when we say that we mean it tongue-in-cheek….but this comment sorta blew my mind & shifted my perspective up and to the left a little thank you♥
The Serotonin is stored in the Ao3
The Serotonin is stored in the Ao3
#this 100% happened to me#but i’m a middle aged writer and english teacher with an academic literature background#when i burned out got sick and had a breakdown i couldn’t read regular books anymore i could only read fanfic#i saw on twitter where someone said literature is prescriptive. you read the kind of fiction that fits your personal need#we’re all overwhelmed right now and that’s why we like the tropey fiction whether fanfic or romance novels or superhero movies#we UNDERSTAND the rules of fiction and dont’ have to work to understand while the payoff comes quickly. kiss. hea. battle/victory
The important thing for me and why fanfic is so much easier is I can pick for my mood.
I can pick a hurt comfort or a slow burn or an angst with a happy ending.
I can remove the tags I don’t want to see, I can check word count,check if it’s finished and it’s so much easier than books
I know these characters and I see them in my mind so they can pull me on journey into a world I love, unless it’s au universes
Tagging fics and sorting them into a system I can deal with, oh yeah and it’s also free so there is that.

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being so fr when I say that transmisogyny has put feminism back like 50 years
what i thought we had distanced ourselves from was the reduction of women to vaginas and wombs and the ability to bear children. i thought we had progressed past ‘dresses are for women and pants are for men.’ i thought we progressed past the idea that someone is less of a woman if she does not adhere strictly to beauty standards. i thought we progressed past the idea that naturally being comfortable adhering to highly feminine standards is vulgar. but i (sarcastically) guess no one could have predicted that trans-exclusive feminism would be the downfall of all the progress we’ve made
“We’re in danger of losing what the entire second wave of feminism, what the entire second wave of women’s liberation was built on, and that was ‘Biology is not destiny’. ‘One is not born a woman,’ Simone de Beauvoir said, ‘one becomes one’. Now there’s some place where transsexual women and other women intersect. Biological determinism has been used for centuries as a weapon against women, in order to justify a second-class and oppressed status. How on Earth, then, are you going to pick up the weapon of biological determinism and use it to liberate yourself? It’s a reactionary tool.”
— Quote by Leslie Feinberg, from TransSisters: The Journal of Transsexual Feminism, issue 7, volume 1. 1995.
How many countries have you been to (including your own)?
1
2-3
4-5
6-7
8-9
10-11
12-13
14-19
20-29
30-39
40-49
50+
Airplane layovers only count if you left the airport for at least an hour.
generative AI literally makes me feel like a boomer. people start talking about how it can be good to help you brainstorm ideas and i’m like oh you’re letting a computer do the hard work and thinking for you???
There are many difficult things that were replaced with technology, and it wasn't a bad thing. Washing machine replaces washing clothes by hand. Nothing wrong with that. Spinning wheel replaces drop spindle. Nothing wrong with that.
Generative AI replaces thinking. The ability to think for yourself will always be important. People that want to control and oppress you want to limit your ability to think for yourself as much as possible, but continuing to practice it allows you to resist them.
"This tool replaces thinking," is a technology problem we (humans) have faced before. It's a snark that I've seen pro-AI contenders take as well: I bet these same people would have complained about calculators! And books!
Well. They did, at the time.
We have records from centuries -- even millennia back -- of scholars at the time complaining that these new-fangled "books" were turning their students lazy; why, they can barely recite any poems in their entirety any more! And there are people still alive today who remember life before widely available calculators, and some of them complained -- then and now -- that bringing them into schools dealt a ruinous blow to math education, and now these young people don't even know how to use a slide-rule.
And the thing is:
They weren't wrong.
The human brain can, when called on, perform incredible feats of memorization. Bards and skalds of old could memorize and recite poems and epics that were thousands of lines long. This is a skill that is largely lost to most of the population. It's not needed any more, and so it is not practiced.
There is a definite generational gap, between the people who were trained on slide-rules and reckoning and the generation that was taught on calculators. There came a year, when that first generation grew up and entered the workforce, when you suddenly started encountering grown adults who could not do math -- not even the very basic arithmetic needed to count down from one hundred. I would go into a shop, buy an item for sixteen dollars, give the cashier a twenty and a one because I want a fiver back, and have them stare at the money in incomprehension -- what do? They don't know how to subtract sixteen from twenty-one. They don't know how to calculate a fifteen-percent tip. They did not exercise the parts of their brain that handle this, because they always had a calculator to do it for them.
Nowadays, newer point-of-sale machines compensate for this; they will automatically calculate and dispense the change, no subtraction necessary on the part of the operator. Nowadays everyone carries a phone, and every phone carries a calculator, so if you need to do these calculations, the tool is right there. As more and more transactions go electronic and card, and cash fades further and further out of daily life, these situations happen less and less; it's not a problem that most people can't do math (until it is.)
The people who complained that these tools-that-replace-thinking would reduce the ability of the broad population to exercise these cognitive skills weren't wrong. It's simply that, as the pace of life changed, the environment changed so that in day-to-day life these skills were largely unnecessary.
So.
Isn't this, ChatGPT and Generative AI, just the latest in a long series of tool-replaces-thought that has, broadly, worked out well for us? What's different about this?
Well, two things are different.
1) In the previous instances of tool-replaces-thinking, the cognitive skill that it replaced was a discrete and, on a day-to-day basis, unnecessary outlay of energy. Most people don't need to memorize thousands of lines of poetry, or anything else for that matter. Most people don't need to do more than cursory levels of math on a day to day basis.
This, however, is different. The cognitive skill that is being obsoleted here is more than "how to write essay" or "identify what is the capital of Rhode Island." It encompasses the entire field of being able to generate new thoughts; of being able to consider and analyze new information; of being able to follow logical trains to their conclusions; of being able to order your thoughts to construct rational arguments; or indeed of being able to express yourself in any structured way. These cognitive tools are not occasional use; they are every day, all the time.
2) In the previous instances of tool-replaces-thinking, the tool was good at what it did.
Calculators may have replaced reckoning, but calculators are also pretty good at what they do. The calculator will, as long as you give the right input, give the right answer. ChatGPT cannot be relied on to do this. ChatGPT will tell you, confidently and unhesitantly and dangerously, that 2+2=5, and it will not care that it is wrong.
Books may have replaced memorization, and books certainly could be wrong; but a fact, once in a book, is pretty stable and steady. There is not a risk that the Guy Who Owns All The Encylopedias might wake up one day and decide -- to pick a purely hypothetical example -- that the Gulf of Mexico is called something else, and suddenly all the encyclopedias say that.
Generative AI fails on both these counts. It fails on every count. It's inaccurate, it's unethical, it's unreliable, it's wrong.
---
I remember some time ago seeing someone say (it was a video about medieval footwear, actually) that "humans have a great energy-saving system: if we can be lazy about something, we are."
This is not a ethical judgment about humans; this is how life works. Animals -- including humans -- will not do something the hard way if they can do it the easy way; this basic principle of conservation of resources is universal and morally neutral. Cognition is biologically expensive, and though our environment is not what it once was, every person still goes through every day choosing what is valuable enough to expend resources on and what is not.
Because of this, I don't know if there is any solution, here. I think pushing back against the downhill flush of the-easy-way-out is a battle both uphill and against the tide.
So I'll just close with this warning, instead:
Generative AI is a tool that cannot be trusted. Do not use it to replace thought.
See also, why people are much more likely to start doing X instead of Y if, the people who want everyone to do X instead of Y, they make X easier to do. Instead of making Y harder to do, or scolding people for continuing to do Y, or ignoring everyone who explains why people are doing Y and what needs to change in order for doing X also-or-instead to be an option.
Reblog if you think the person you reblogged this from deserves to be happy.
The top 100 novels of all time published in English, as voted for by authors, critics and academics worldwide. How many have you read?
How many of the Guardian's 100 best novels of all time have you read?
0-10
11-20
21-30
31-40
41-50
51-60
61-70
71-80
81-90
91-100
Bonus: add in the tags which one is your favourite.

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ursula k le guin affirmations for your day:
it is our differences which make us dearer to one another
it is never too late to start loving
the enemy is not the foreigner, but the ones who tell you to hate the foreigner
everyone should have food, shelter, and work
everything is a yin and yang metaphor if you try hard enough
sci-fi is important
Rewatched Young Royals and like it’s great it’s a great show and I love it very much but honestly my biggest takeaway is still just…
Why is Omar Rudberg THAT pretty