Intermediate instructions

That picture looks so shopped it's like they want us to believe this meeting wasn't real. Trump isn't that alert in any other picture taken in the last three months or more.

I am so tired of short-attention-span, trim-the-fat culture. All writing advice these days is for how to write like Chuck Palahniuk. "Cut 'think', cut 'feel', cut 'wonder' - only action, only pushing forward, show and move and move and move." What if I could emulate this style, and still don't want to? What if I want to write like Henry James, with three paragraphs of introspective musings between each dialogue line? The music advice is, "make it shortform, make it Tik-Tok compatible, make it punchy, hit the refrain as soon as possible." What if I want that 10-minute prog rock piece? What if I want that symphony? What if I want it slow and luxurious and lazy? Movies. Series. Poetry. Bodies. Everything is "trimmed trimmed trimmed trimmed, stripped bare, you have three seconds to win me over, make it airport chic." I don't want to win you over, then, I guess. I want the fat left it. I want the pleasure and the indolence and the indulgence. Fuck this art-advice that's always "your art needs Ozempic."

Come to think, it's a bit weird how okay we are as a society with rubbing a cat's erogenous zone at any and all times, like animals having sex is a perfectly family friendly thing they show in nature documentaries, that's alright, but like personally involving yourself in making a cat feel like if you had your nipples massaged

You simply can't let cishet men have a monopoly on defining masculinity. Some of those guys feel emasculated when their male dog squats to pee, they can not be trusted to think critically.

Coming out as trans gave me permission to sit down and piss, and you know what, ten years later I still think about it every time I elect to sit on the porcelain throne. Every little fucking thing in men's lives is so rigidly, painfully, unforgivingly, unreasonably ordered, every little fucking thing has to be just so, fitting into the narrowest form just for the sake of everyone and everything fitting into its form. Patriarchy makes all of us not free.

I got Sans. Oh boy. At least he beat me, I mean, I could absolutely not finish my genocide run because the Sans fight is like, 100x too hard. So that'll be chill. Just gonna have to deal with an adult skeleton son with chronic depression who's an absolute beast who's going to 100% murder you if you piss him off. Maybe I can direct him at the Kremlin and then the White House and make the world a little less of a place to be sad about.

i want a Superman story about Superman realizing she's a trans woman. how would she tell people? who would she tell? how could she tell them? through what possible ways would she transition? Kryptonian biology may not necessarily be compatible with human hormone replacement therapy and needles are certainly out of the question. if she figures it out, at what point does her presentation change? superman can't take a break, people need her, even if her haircut is getting awkwardly long and her body is uncomfortable to be in. everyone on earth knows who Superman is, knows her face. is her secret identity threatened if Clark Kent mysteriously starts to transition at the same time as Superman? if she only lets one be publicly out, which one? and what would it feel like to put on that costume -- in either case -- if so? if someone tries to attack her on the street, as Ms. Kent, how does she hide her secret identity? how would the world itself react to someone with the strength to juggle planets being a tranny? with her super-hearing there's nothing she wouldn't know about what people are saying, nevermind what's being written in the press. how does SuperMAN, one of the most definitive icons of masculine indomitability and resilience, cope with changing? would her strength, her confidence, her ability to do anything suddenly be used against her? why can't she be more like wonder woman? why is voice training so hard even for someone with super-ventriloquism? does anyone know what it's like to be able to run faster than a speeding bullet and leap tall buildings in a single bound but to not be able to find a cute pair of shoes that fits? to be indestructible but afraid to use a public bathroom? would even the most powerful person on earth not feel just as helpless as i do?

It's fine to disagree with the IAU about the definition of "planet"; however, if your definition includes Pluto but not Ceres, Orcus, Haumea, Quaoar, Makemake, Gonggong, Eris or Sedna, you don't actually care what a planet is – you just want the exact list of nine planets you learned in primary school back. Your cute little Pluto-including orbital distance mnemonic ought to be at least seventeen words long, and good fucking luck with the Q!

My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Orphic Palaces, Slandering Hungry Quaker Matrons Going Erotically Southward.

I appreciate that you included Salacia but not Charon – really threading the needle pedantry-wise there.

I had a mnemonic for the names of Jupiter's moons, but unfortunately by the time I memorized it it was out of date

They let English football fans into their country to watch a game, they knew what they were in for

And you know, for young writers, this has got to be so detrimental just from the perspective of opening your document and seeing a million corrections that, frankly, don't need to be there. If you're a young writer you're likely not going to have the background knowledge to know what is and isn't a good suggestion, you're just going to see a document that makes it look like you made every mistake possible so clearly you must be a terrible, stupid writer and should just give up.

Maybe I've used LibreOffice too long but I had thought the only ways to ensure the computers don't screw with your formatting if you're sending people things to read was to either make a PDF or print it on paper. Maybe inconvenient if you do very close collaboration things and you can count on MS Word working the same way for everyone (?), but it still seems a lot less inconvenient than having AI enforcing nonsense opinions on your writing content and style.

I don't like to make too much of a business of joking about how the US military is bad at doing war because the inverse (a world where we're good at wars) would be an even worserer situation but like. Jiminy fucking Christ we're really really bad at wars it's downright remarkable

I'm really hung up on the oil thing. I love the part where we apparently have a critical interest in preserving the economy of the country we're trying to blow up because our economy will collapse if their economy collapses. I just. That's the worst anyone's ever done it, buddy. It's like the eternal war in 1984 but like the Jason Friedberg version of 1984. If the term total war describes the Clausewitzian mobilization of an entire country's political and economic apparatus towards war then the USA of America is in a permanent state of Quarter-Ass War. Like they're never gonna get there but they're gonna keep on trying anyways

it feels like their incompetence at war is directly linked to a desire to do war. It's trite to say but I think "They are so bad at war they want to wage it" works for the modern era. The more the bomber mentality took over in ww2 and afterwards, the worse America got at war and the more they wanted to do it. Being good at war would involve knowing how disastrous/expensive/long it would be to try it.

Last I checked (today), the Iran war has cost the US 130-135 billion dollars in military resources and skyrocketing costs of living. Aside from various war crimes including bombing 168 schoolgirls on day one and gaining various criminals a bunch of billions from insider trading, it has accomplished nothing. Cutting their losses and paying 300 billion in reparations as Iran demands is overwhelmingly the best available option for the US; it could only be better if they had done it six weeks ago

In light of recent events, I have begun submitting bug reports when I see mature content labels applied inappropriately to posts, especially if an appeal has been rejected.

Extremely good idea - how are you doing it? Through the contact us option?

for what it's worth: after a few months of submitting help tickets as 'feedback' when i saw a post inappropriately flagged as mature, i tried following this suggestion instead. today i got my first-ever response from tumblr support on this issue, letting me know that a post i'd submitted a ticket before has had its mature content flag removed.