Act Over Fear

every horror writer in history wanted what the 19th floor subplot in the Wayside School books had

Also the gentlemen with the black attaché case who offer you the choice between being safe or being free and the dead rats who live in the basement.

I have no idea what Wayside School is

It’s a trilogy of absurdist children’s novels published by Louis Sachar (the author of Holes) about a school that was supposed to be one storey with thirty rooms but is actually thirty storeys with a room on each floor because the builders were holding the plans sideways (and apparently this is how architecture works). Each book consists of a series of thirty loosely interrelated short stories about the students on the thirtieth floor, and there are a bunch of weird anomalous things that become running gags throughout the novels and, actually, now that I think about it, I can definitely see how Night Vale would have been inspired by this

experiencing adolescence in the 2010s has fucked my perspective of the word “epic” totally beyond repair. i will forever view it in the same league as words like “awesomesauce” and “legitness” im sorry. theres just no going back

we used to get christmas episodes of television. halloween episodes. valentines. we used to get television that felt like part of your life. like it was happening alongside your life. now we mostly get 8 episodes dropping all at once every two years and they don't have time for any of that. i miss characters living alongside us

My uncle works at PEMDAS and he's saying they're adding a new way of fucking with numbers called "gleebing it"

the only thing stronger than the gastric distress i get from eating cherries is my love for eating cherries

what

thank you. im once again reminded why i love tumblr because where else could i get content like this

There's really this strong temptation that everyone has which basically says "to have interiority is to be like me; ordinary people are surface everywhere." And this manifests in different ways in different spaces, and becomes really pronounced when you cluster together with similar people. So tumblr users often act like straight people don't have any interiority because it helps you feel the deepening of social bonds with other gay people. This happens professionally too. I think it was Summer or Sharks who was saying that programming people think that intelligence is just being really good at writing code. Not surprising but very strange to me! I am (equally ridiculously) used to thinking that intelligence is being really good at philosophy, having command of a lot of sources that you can use creatively, etc. This reflects a kind of dynamic on tumblr and reddit. On reddit to have interiority is to be a science guy and on tumblr to have interiority is to be a humanities girl (and the dynamic is gendered in exactly this way). And I think there is something dangerous about habitually regarding other people as automatons. It's good to have people outside of your niche to remind you that other people from different walks of life are quite deep and complicated. They are full of love and fine grained attention to things you never thought to care about. And I think a lot of people go through life thinking of themselves as perpetually victimized by basically empty people rather than having genuine confrontations with full, genuine people who are committed to subtle, complex and real values, who have detailed and intricate histories, and who have a bond to you that you might never quite fully understand. But we rarely even try at understanding these things. We just decide that they're stupid and ridiculous and unreasonable.

There is a standard media depiction of a "healed" person. Someone who has Gone To Therapy. I've noticed this in a few works recently. We often see them at the end of a story, maybe in a "ten years later" epilogue. They speak in a soft, serene voice. They have Accepted what they cannot change. They have let go of a lot, including most of what we see them actually care about in the story itself. They are Happy, At Peace, in some non-descript way. They bare little resemble to the person we were actually shown. They bare little resemblance to any person. We were shown, as we usually are in stories, an agent, a desirer, someone becoming. Now they have Become. And they look back on all that silly becoming as something childish that they have moved past. Fire, you know, fire is for children who don't know any better. To be Healed is to have your fire rightly extinguished; to not even miss it.

"DSM-5 seems to have no definition of happiness other than the absence of suffering. The normal individual in this book is tranquilized and bovine-eyed, mutely accepting everything in a sometimes painful world without ever feeling much in the way of anything about it." — Sam Kriss's review of the DSM-5 as a piece of surrealist literature

the thing about capitalism is that at a certain point a product reaches its maximum audience and cant really be improved (at least not while remaining profitable), but capitalism requires a product provide infinite growth, and at that point the only way to increase profits is to raise prices, cut corners, and in the case of services start adding advertisements. this is just how the system works.

you really cant be buying cheap toilet paper as a bushed up warrior because it always leaves your pussy a crumb sandwich

the idea that predators and abusers are an ontological category of person, rather than everyone having the capacity to be predatory and abusive, leads to people having no regard for boundaries because they think that predation only comes from evil people ™

My woke take, as someone who has worked in both a public library and a school library, is that we desperately need both more books that are at a higher reading level but a less mature subject matter, and more books that are at a lower reading level but a more mature subject matter, because 8 year olds who are advanced readers are still 8 year olds and don't want to read about graphic violence and torture, and teens and adults who have learning difficulties or who are just later readers for whatever reason are still teens and adults and don't want to read about Billy the Bunny going to school or whatever the hell.