Secrets of SBoPL

Tunneling upward out of the darkness where they had lain in wait for 13 years, the latest brood of Disney child stars reportedly emerged from the ground Monday, filling the air with their mindless droning.

Thousands of spunky young actors, part of the child performer population known as Brood D, were spotted bursting out of the soil en masse within the 51-acre Walt Disney Studios campus, where they wriggled through the grass on their bellies in search of a vertical surface to climb up and cling to. Earsplitting screeches were heard as the child stars frantically delivered lines from yet-to-exist scripts about surfers who were secretly werewolves, preteen mayors who could speak to animals, and triplets separated at birth and suddenly reunited at the same hip-hop boarding school.

-but my house has a porch on the second story that affords me a terrific view of my neighborhood and the Colorado Front Range and I was partaking of some peace before the 4th Of July Finger-Loss Festivities begin, and I have had a

~*Spiritual Experience*~

I just watched my neighbor try to unload an actual wooden pallet that had to have been forklifted into the back of his insecurity pickup worth of fireworks.

Except that he does not have a forklift in his garage.

He does have so much sports memorabilia and cardboard boxes of unsold MLM Merchandise and patriotically themed camping gear and posters of women in bikinis and flags of suspect political organizations in his garage that there is only BARELY enough space for the fireworks and certainly none for his truck.

So he had to unload the individual boxes of recreational explosives from the back of his truck and stack them in the minimal space he had cleared by hand. This is a tedious and time-consuming process as this neighbor has purchased a wide variety of recreational and locally illegal explosives instead of many of just a few types, so the individual boxes are rather small.

He begins, and this is crucial to what happens next, by cutting apart the industrial-grade saran wrap his explosives dealer had so carefully wrapped his merchandise in, and discarded it unsecured on his lawn.

Where Outdoor Conditions sometimes happen.

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

Today, Mouse’s principles had been compromised, because (among other things) I had allowed their two-year-old friend to finish eating an apple core that Mouse had not entirely abandoned (violating an ancient rule of chivalry) but when this was pointed out, I hissed privately that we had to let the baby eat the apple, citing some obscure law about ‘hospitality’. I had also asked Mouse to overlook this baby’s other crimes, such as chucking toy cars about, and flagrantly hogging a small balloon.

“That,” mouse says strongly, all propriety outraged, “is NOT sharing!!!”

Earlier in the day, after swimming, when Mouse’s best friend Bess acquired some gummy snacks, Bess did NOT trade them with a favourable exchange rate for Mouse’s generously offered cheese snacks; and one of Mouse’s other good friends, Syndy, has invited them over to play fire engines NEXT week. Attentive minds will instantly notice that this is not THIS week, when Mouse would prefer it to happen.

Syndy furthermore is persisting in having their birthday party in MARCH, not tomorrow - I DO hope you can understand the stress that Mouse is under. Also, Mouse has - in their own opinion- generously offered to forgive these crimes, by kissing and making up; but, although their friends often accept the snog, they continue the crimes. Thus, poor Mouse! The last defender of good manners! A parfait gentil knight! Is reduced to screaming: THIS IS NOT WHAT WE DO. That is TOO MUCH.

(Bess demonstrated being Too Much this morning by uncoupling their car seat and climbing into the boot of a car, and sprinting across a parking lot while their sire howled in anguish; while respecting Bess’s tremendous coolness and defiance, Mouse is the first one to condemn their wild behaviour, and the loudest voice to shriek: “NO BESS YOU ARE BEING TOO MUCH.”)

When Mouse, aged 3, and I came downstairs this evening - I had just had a Mouse-assisted shower- we found that Bear, aged 9, was watching Galaxy Quest with their sire.

Mouse watched with appreciation as a pretty lady on the screen snogged an attractive man. “Oh,” they said, tenderly, delighted.

The kiss deepened. “OH!” Mouse hooted, and coo’ed with approval, as someone who snogs their friends with almost-alarming lack of discrimination - they said, supportively, “oh good! A good kiss.”

The lady produced some tentacles.

“Oh, WHAT?” mouse said, aggrieved by this. “Oh WHAT!!!!”

The lady produced more tentacles, and helpfully dragged the man under.

“THAT IS NOT,” howled a beleaguered Mouse, “HOW WE KISSING.” And they proceeded to shriek in outrage; “NO LADY! That is NOT NICE KISSING! YOU STOP IT!”

The snogging continued. The man disappeared.

“MUMMY,” Mouse shrieked, “MUMMY, LADY NOT NICE KISSING!”

“Er,” i said.

“HIM SAD,” mouse said, feeling tremendously on the side of the gentleman, “THAT IS TOO MUCH.”

“Well, you see, Mousey,” I said, inadequately: “sometimes, some ladies are squids…”

I petered out.

Well played Merriam-Webster.

Another one is the verb "perceive" i.e. "don't perceive me" "I am perceiving" "I am being percieved." That's something that feels very specific to tumblr parlance.

There's the thing where people on tumblr have an emotional reaction to something and instead of, or in addition to telling you how they feel about it using emotion words, they will narrate a fictional action in the present progressive tense. "I am gnawing at the bars of my enclosure "I am kissing you on the mouth" "you are going into the soup" "you are getting all of the awards"

I once saw someone use that response format in ... I think it was a restaurant review, or a doordash review, or something like that. It was very unexpected seeing it outside of a tumblr post.

sadly my project is lost due to the website being wiped from the university database after graduation and my then laptop having a major hardware failure. backup your backups people! but the crux of the entire module was that the internet is full of communities using language not only as jargon for specific purpose but also to signal membership in said community. I even wrote a bit about non capitalisation and punctuation useage as a visual cue on tumblr and how including information in the reblog body or the tags indicated different levels of importance or intimacy of thought