your local humble mess

if you are a parent, or may become one, or you are otherwise likely to arrive in the situation of caring for a child while they eat, promise me this: if a child doesn't like a certain food or food group, you will ask them WHY. and specifically, you will pay attention to either confirming or ruling out "it makes my mouth itch" or "it makes my stomach hurt," both of which are medically important info that children may not provide unprompted. which i know because this PSA has been brought to you by "i spent my entire childhood and much of my early teens eating peas and lentils while wondering why everyone else liked the Violently Itchy Mouth Sensation so much, like were they a bunch of legume masochists or something, before i finally realized that Violently Itchy Mouth Sensation was in fact a sinister demon appearing only to me, and her true demonic name was: Legume Allergy"

The really funny part is that many modern sources that want to gas up Sparta will bring up this specific anecdote, but stop at the "if" and just not mention what happened immediately afterwards.

similarly, "μολὼν λαβέ" (come and take them) is a really cool thing to say, made significantly less cool by having them taken

Being a writer is wild because one minute you’re convinced you’re a genius and the next you’re googling ‘synonyms for walk’ like you’ve never used language before.

something that i find interesting about independent animation nowadays is that if you don't have studio/streamer backing, you have to release your work yourself on the internet, but you have to do it for free on the internet because virtually nobody is going to be willing to accept a paywall just for one original show, so what you have to do in order to make any money off of it is make all of your money from merchandising, but then this means that you show must be merchandisable and have very toyetic character designs that translate easily to plushies and whatnot, but then you also need to cater your show to people who are disproportionately inclined to buy merchandise like that in the first place so that your sales can be enough to sustain you, which means that even if you want to communicate complex or difficult ideas in your work, your independent animation project must attract (at least on a first impression) and retain viewers who are both very consumerist and very capable of rabid passion, which unfortunately has a single-circle shaped venn diagram with a lot of the most toxic fandom tendencies known to man, and this explains a lot of things about independent animation and its fandoms nowadays I think

Since Google is useless now I propose the new phrase "Wikipedia is free" when someone tries to derail a post they know jack shit about

forever thinking of catra from the 2018 she-ra series. what if you were deeply in love with your best friend. what if you chose long ago to abandon your morals to stay by her side. what if, at the very first chance, she was faced with the same decision and chose her morals over you. what if your grief over that choice was so immense that it fueled five seasons of television and almost ended the world. what if, at the end of it all, the end of the very world she fought so hard to save, you asked her to stay and she finally, finally did

Just One Guy, Just One Spider-Man… -OR Woman?!? We don’t Know; ….forsure.

its actually easy to de-enshittify your digital experience all you need to do is install this browser extension and this browser extension and this browser extension and input this custom script into the advanced box and go into your system settings and reconfigure all these options you didnt know existed and change your entire workflow and switch to this alternative operating system and this alternative web browser and this alternative chat client and this alternative word processor and this alternative- sorry that one turned out to be malware delete that one okay now double check your task manager for unwanted background processes and element block these ads and invest in a good VPN and append all your searches with AI blocking keywords and wait a few years until everything you just did becomes shitty too so you can do it all over again okay kitten. its literally that easy.

the idea that a sex scene in fiction is fundamentally useless/simply for audience titillation UNLESS they’re fucking infodumping exposition while they bone or something is so funny and myopic to me. like, you really genuinely believe for real that there is NOTHING to be gained about your understanding of a story or characters simply from how they approach and engage in sex? really for real?

does anyone have that unsettling oil painting of a dark window with a sheet leading out into the darkness? it did the rounds on tumblr a while ago and i need itttt

Litmus test for “is the brightness on your phone too low for art appreciation”