Fangirl Obsessions

Fictional characters are objects.

Stop telling people to encourage the cop inside their head.

How you treat fictional characters, given they are entirely objects of fiction, does NOT necessarily speak to your own character, and you do not need to be "careful".

It is not dangerous to imagine dark things happening to fictional characters. It does not mean you are secretly a bad person. It does not mean you unconsciously want to hurt people in real life. It is not a "slippery slope" to doing bad things to people in real life. You cannot damage your brain or turn yourself into a bad person by consuming "dark" fanfic.

Seterra quizzes - lots of 'click where on the map [place] is' games

Worldle - guess a country by the shape of its outline, with the distance/direction if you get it wrong. You can also guess capital, neighbours, population, flag, currencies, major cities, and size

Globle - enter the name of a country and get a warmer-cooler colour for how close the target country is

Globle capitals - similar, but with capital cities

Flaggle - a flag divided into sixths, and each guess reveals another portion along with distance/direction as a hint

Wheretaken - guess which country a photo comes from, then guess the capital, capital's location, a landmark, the landmark's name, and which city another photo comes from (this one can be tricky: pictures come from wikimedia commons so sometimes it's like... a gutter)

Geoguessr - drops you somewhere in the world on google street view and you can navigate around trying to to guess what street in the world your drop point was

I started playing these daily a couple of years ago, and now I can point to almost any country on a map (South Pacific is still a little tricky). Along with trivia like flags and capitals, I've picked up a lot about different places' architecture, languages, and foliage. Often when you play these you'll become curious: why does a Spanish-speaking country have a French-sounding capital? Why is there a really long edge on that border? What does the bird on that flag represent? Where is that beautiful temple in the picture?

“What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? A moment of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber.”

“I knew that monsters were far more gentle and more desirable than the monsters living inside ‘nice people.’ Accepting that you are a monster gives you the leeway to not behave like one. When you deny being a monster, you behave like one.”

“When you see something or experience something extraordinary, you can’t go back to normal… I think that that’s the way I see the supernatural-as happening in mundane circumstances or to people who are unprepared”

“To learn what we fear is to learn who we are. Horror defines our boundaries and illuminates our souls”

“Any legend, any creature, any symbol we ever stumble on, already exists in a vast cosmic reservoir where archetypes wait. Shapes looming outside our Platonic cave. We naturally believe ourselves clever and wise, so advanced, and those who came before us so naïve and simple…when all we truly do is echo the order of the universe, as it guides us…”

And the last but certainly not the least:

if you see a popular post where two people are jokingly giving each other shit, it is both possible and extremely likely that these two people are friends messing around. if you approach a stranger with this overly familiar hostile energy, you are not being funny. you are just being rude.

remember that it is both extremely possible and highly likely that op will see everything you add to their posts, including tags. don't say things you would not say to their face.

a post urging people to not be rude to strangers is not a wink-nudge suggestion that people should actually be rude, nor is it a sign that op just needs to toughen up. asking people to be kind is not an outlandish request. if you find yourself offended or see it as an opportunity to show how funny you can be by being mean to someone you don't know, you're just an asshole.

it is much easier to say nothing than to go out of your way to be rude. blocking people is good and healthy. block whoever you want!

posts were more often than not made to express one's thoughts, feelings, experiences, etc. they are not intended to be directed at you, nor should they be taken personally

every account has a person behind it who can see and respond to your actions

That’s not problem solving. It’s barely catharsis, in practice. It doesn’t just create more problems than it solves, it destroys more solutions than it creates.

Put the apocalypse down, and back away slowly.

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And maybe I'm just ancient, but since when has fandom ever been about validating canon? Canon is incidental to fandom output. It is, at best, a guideline. You can stick to it, or you can go so far off the beaten path that you fall off the edge of the world and wind up in a new one where the map has words like "here be dragons" stamped in the upper corner.

Fandom is about exploration beyond the canon. It can look like canon, talk like canon, and sometimes even emulate it so perfectly you'd swear you've found the author's secret account, but it doesn't have to.