Puffbird Studio

And then all the other Sesame Street character accounts joined in:

And now I’m thinking maybe we’re gonna be okay… 💗

"So, boss... I may have messed up."

"What did you do, Ray?"

"Well, I made a post for Elmo saying 'Hi, how's everybody doing?'"

"I mean, that's kind of what we pay you for."

"Yeah, but.... <sigh> it turns out pretty much everyone is hanging on by a thread, badly enough that they needed to tell Elmo."

"Oh."

"God help me, boss, I think Elmo needs to be there for them."

For background, I'm a shop owner. I own a small brick and mortar (ok, plywood and LVL and weird fake brick, but whatever) yarn store in a suburban town. 

I keep getting emails from review sites, my point of sale system, random cold calls: "increase your sales!" "advertise in more markets!" "unchecked growth!" "people always need more!"

Okay, those last two were paraphrases, but the first two aren't.

And like. We're a small shop. I have a relatively large staff and it's still under ten people. Only two or three of us can actually get a package in the mail. Mostly we have to have a whole conversation with a customer who comes in. I don't want unchecked growth, I don't even want a ton of checked growth. I want steady sales with a stable number of regular customers who buy yarn when they have a new project, and a medium number (maybe 25%?) of new customers who are themselves a mix of people who will become regulars and one-off tourists who will think of us fondly when they go back home. I want a medium number of online sales, again a mix of regulars who know and like us (maybe some of those tourists!) and people who are frantically looking for one last skein to finish a project. 

Unchecked growth is BAD. It's unsustainable for us, the humans who actually package and sell the yarn, and it's unsustainable for the customers, who will soon be drowning in yarn that they don't have time to work with because they're too busy buying yarn, and it's unsustainable for the YARN MARKET since there are people who have a finite number of people hours each. Slow, small, steady growth that doesn't balloon out and create a problem for us later is my ideal.

I do understand that the many many MANY people who are trying to sell me advertising don't really care about this, they have been told that their job needs unchecked growth and that they need to keep making their sales numbers increase, despite the fact that that's wildly unsustainable for them, but.

Guys.

What if there was enough. Not too much, not too little, but enough. What would the world look like if we strove for "enough" rather than "more all the time"? Wouldn't that be nice?

I know that Tumblr doesn't think this is weird and radical, but maybe MAYBE one of the people who's got a horrible sales job at an unnamed review site will happen across this post and think "hmm, maybe it's not me, maybe she just really doesn't want any advertising."

I live in hope, I guess. Hope and a constant state of "no thank you we've got plenty."

The FFXV 2026 Remix and 2026 Remix Madness are now open. Sign ups close this weekend!

WHAT IS THE REMIX EVENT?

The FFXV Remix is an event where you recreate someone else’s FFXV content with your own interpretation. It is an event intended for people who are interested in stretching their creative muscles and playing in someone else’s sandbox. Sign up for this event because you want to create in someone else’s world, not because you want to receive anything. There are no pinch hitters, so there is no guarantee that your work will get remixed, in the end. At the end of the day, the Remix is not a gift exchange. The person assigned to your works does not have to create content you would want to consume. To quote someone back from the early beginnings of the dawn of the remix challenge, “even if you don’t like what’s done to your story, your story is still *yours* and no one can take it from you. Someone else playing with it doesn’t change the original text.”

The remix is for you if:

You want the challenge of being randomly assigned a creator's works to remix.

You're comfortable with random matching.

You meet the minimum number of works required to participate.

WHAT IS THE REMIX MADNESS EVENT?

The FFXV Remix Madness is an event where people give permission for anyone to recreate specific FFXV content with their own interpretation. Submit your own FFXV works to this event because you want to provide others with the chance to play in your sandbox. Claim prompts in this event if you’re interested in stretching your creative muscles. This is not a gift exchange. There are no matches, no pinch hitters, and no guarantee that your work will get remixed. People who claim a work for Remix Madness do not have to create content the original creator would want to consume. To quote someone back from the early beginnings of the dawn of the remix challenge, “even if you don’t like what’s done to your story, your story is still *yours* and no one can take it from you. Someone else playing with it doesn’t change the original text.” Remix Madness is a free-for-all version of the main FFXV Remix. No assignments, no matching—just remix madness using the prompt meme challenge in AO3. Remix Madness runs like a prompt meme instead of a gift exchange. You don’t need to sign up to remix someone else’s work. And there’s no word count minimum for what can be submitted for remixing—anything goes, as long as it’s complete.

Remix madness is for you if:

You don't have enough qualifying works to participate in the FFXV Remix.

You're concerned about the random matching system in the FFXV Remix.

lightning study

and what strikes me is that, content and characterisation aside, a lot of these stories and books have structures that are alien to me. i'm used to stories having certain features which classifies them as stories, and some of these classics have been amusingly deviant from my expectations.

the best way i can think of to describe them is to compare the structure of a story to that of a suburban house. bear with me here, see if the analogy sticks-

currently reading sherlock holmes stories. delightful houses. solid. they may be a bit plain but all the rooms are present and functional and easy to navigate. loving these houses.

just finished edgar allen poe stories. sooome of these are houses as i know them, with the usual rooms. some of these houses are tents. some of them are elaborately house-like on the outside but consist only of a single beautifully decorated corridor from the front door straight to the back. some of these houses appear gorgeous from the front and then you open the door to realise nobody's actually built the rest of the house

moby dick was an effort. i struggled. this is by all accounts a house you could live in but it, for some reason, also has fifty closets. there's a bed and bath sure but just, at least 80% of this house is closets. frankly especially bewildering for someone who was always told about the single stunning living room of this house.

phantom of the opera was delightful. beautiful gothic mansion on the outside, as promised, with an interior to match... but the wallpaper consists of brightly coloured polka-dots.

My illustrations the most based poem about tigers by Nael, age 6