Vishfull

and that is why research on queer identities, whether gender, sexuality, or romance, is so needed!

Yeah you're cute when you sleep but you didn't let me sleep either so I'm going to annoy you now because I'm bored. Hahah get poked, sleepy idiot.

How do you not comprehend this when I am literally staring at you. Like I understand that your brain can't understand things this nuanced but come on, how do you not get this.

I don't know if you know that what I am currently doing is an expression of affection, but that won't stop me. Knowing that I showed you that I love you is enough.

I heard a crinkly material and the sound of you chewing so I have to know what's in your mouth RIGHT FUCKING NOW.

I can't communicate with you and you can't communicate with me, so I'm just copying the tone of the sound you're making in hopes that you understand that I try.

You are doing activities beyond my comprehension, and I find this fascinating. I will never understand what the fuck you are trying to achieve here, but I am intrigued nonetheless.

Scene 1:

So, my mom had THE TALK with 12/13 yo me.

Mom: You might feel attracted to boys

Me (strongly objecting): But I don't

Mom: You will

Me (having seen girls in my class have crushes on celebs or even stupid boys of the class): But I don't

Mom (sighing in defeat): well, good. That's a good thing if you don't. But even if you do don't do anything stupid.

Me (thinking well, not gonna be a problem since I am a "good girl")

Fast forward 10 years.....

Total Cookie Protection works by creating a separate “cookie jar” for each website you visit. Instead of allowing trackers to link up your behavior on multiple sites, they just get to see behavior on individual sites. Any time a website, or third-party content embedded in a website, deposits a cookie in your browser, that cookie is confined to the cookie jar assigned to only that website. No other websites can reach into the cookie jars that don’t belong to them and find out what the other websites’ cookies know about you — giving you freedom from invasive ads and reducing the amount of information companies gather about you.

This approach strikes the balance between eliminating the worst privacy properties of third-party cookies – in particular the ability to track you – and allowing those cookies to fulfill their less invasive use cases (e.g. to provide accurate analytics). With Total Cookie Protection in Firefox, people can enjoy better privacy and have the great browsing experience they’ve come to expect.

Eg: a 35 yr old may want to buy a house. Settle down

Whereas a 23 yr old may just want to travel and is not even thinking about settling down

Basically, you have different expectations of how your life looks like 5 yrs/10 yrs from now.

“Whoa,” Sam says, drawing his legs towards himself and flipping his book shut. He’s seated against the wall opposite the bedroom, and his feet had been nearly touching the end of the hall before Cas had stumbled over them. His eyes flick to the shut door, and then back to Cas. “Dean’s asleep?”

Cas nods. “Out like a light,” he replies. “Jack, too.” Cas had left them curled together. They’d gravitated towards one another as soon as Cas had extricated himself. He’d go back before they woke up—wouldn’t dare to let either of them wake up without him in the room—but even the sound of their snuffling breaths hadn’t been enough to drown out the darkness.

“Yeah,” Sam replies, hauling himself up with a hand against the wall, and then continues with an inexplicable, “They would be.”

But that can wait. Your guest is tired, jumpy, and understandably in need of time to rest and recover. You won’t need her help for the warfare aspect anyway. You ensure your demonic servants will protect her with their lives and make her feel safe and welcome. Then you set aside some time in your busy schedule of conquest to check on the poor girl. Purely to determine whether she’s in prime condition for manipulating, of course. Your future puppet ruler will be more likely to cooperate if you build a solid foundation of respect and trust, after all.

Years of serving as the Dark Lord have taught you that your minions work harder when you treat them well. So you provide your young guest with everything she requests, within reason of course. She says she hasn’t slept well lately because her stuffed animal was left behind when she fled home. You ask if there are any other things of hers she misses from her old home. With a now completed list, you send your most covert operatives to the enemy palace to execute a most wicked heist of a stuffed animal and the princess’s dog dubbed Sir Meatball, as well as a few books she would read for comfort. You congratulate yourself on how evil it is of you to steal a dog. And just for good measure you have your minions perform reconnaissance on the palace. You’ll have to invade it soon anyway. May as well multitask.

The interesting thing is the hero the enemy sends to fight you. The chosen one it would seem, although it continues to baffle you how young he is. Young and impressionable. He barely knows how to hold that magic sword he wields. It’s barely light enough for him to lift. You send your winged minions to carry him toward your evil castle of dread and terror. You greet him at the landing pad on the roof. He insists on dueling you, even as his sword shakes in his sweaty palms. The prophecy says he will defeat you in a one-on-one duel. Very well, you decide. If something goes wrong you have medics on hand. You wouldn’t want someone to die from a friendly duel. He’s no match for you, you soon find. You humor him for a while. He obviously came a long way to duel you after all, and you can tell he’s trying very hard to hit you with that sword. You give him a few passing tips as you fight, and he thanks you awkwardly.

Then the princess interrupts your duel. “Maximus!” She chides, “you promised to take me dragon riding this afternoon!”

You turn to your dark secretary of doom, Jerry, who squints at the evil schedule of hopelessness and cries out. “Ah! She’s right, my lord. My sincerest apologies.”

“That’s alright, my faithful minion,” you say while holding the tip of the chosen’s sword between two fingers. “This whole duel thing was a bit of a spontaneous thing, and I should have looked at the schedule first.” You look down at the boy. “I’m sorry, child, but it seems I have a commitment to fulfill with the dear princess. Can we reschedule this duel for a later date?”

“Wh-what? No! The duel has already started, you can’t just back out like that!” He says, trying with all his might to pry his sword free from your grip.

“Very well,” you say with a sigh. “In that case, I forfeit, and you win the duel by default. There, that fulfills the prophecy. Would you like a ride home?”

The chosen one blinks with shock. “I-“

“Oh, what am I saying? You’ve come all this way, you must be exhausted. You ought to stay for dinner later. We’re having doom chicken soup of eternal darkness! It’s absolutely to die for.”

The boy looks at the princess quizzically. She assures him it’s just normal chicken soup. You vehemently deny this, saying you’re evil cook of evilness Frederick is supernaturally good at his job, and to refer to the fruits of his labor as “just normal soup” would be an insult to all the work he puts in.

You take the princess dragon-riding, and later that evening during dinner the chosen one breaks down crying. You ask him what’s wrong. He opens up about his confusion. He’d spent his entire journey up on this point dreading the responsibility thrust upon him. He’d barely survived several encounters with monsters and demons and now that he’s here, he’s questioning his entire perspective. After all, he says, you’ve been treating him better than anyone ever did back home and despite the spiky black armor you seem so genuinely kind. He doesn’t know what to do, he confesses.

You reassure him that no one expects anything of him, and that he can stay as long as he’d like, or he could simply go back home in the morning. You won’t stop him. He says he still has to fulfill the other half of the prophecy, freeing the princess from those who would cause her harm. The princess assures him that she is not in any danger where she is, and that if he really wants to fulfill the prophecy he ought to help you overthrow her parents.

“Th-the enemy, my lord. Th-they’re using h-healing magic as a t-torture method! I-I was the only one of my scouting party to escape capture, a-and I’m ashamed to say I couldn’t bare to observe for long before it was t-t-too much. I-I panicked, your evilness! The way they made their skin boil and swell with cancerous growths a-and…oh dark gods below, the bones, the protruding bones!”

Your hand rests on the lower right side of your rib cage, where you can still feel the stumps of the bones that grew outward and pierced through your flesh all those years ago. You know from experience what those scouts must be going through, and though you’d never show it in front of your subjects, you’re terrified.

As he finishes his tale, Gregory breaks down into sobs, begging for forgiveness from his captured comrades under his breath. You gently tell him it’s alright, that there was nothing he could have done. At least by running away he ensures that this information got back to you. You make a vow to him that the crimes of the enemy will not go unpunished. Once Gregory has been led out of the room, the door closing behind him, you lean back into your spiky black chair at the head of the map table and rub your temples. You ask Jerry if that was the last of the scouts who returned today. He says yes, that was the last one. You thank the gods below, and begin planning a counterattack on the borders, as well as a rescue operation for the captured scouts. You have faith in their capacity to resist revealing valuable information to the enemy, but with torture methods like that…

You push the thought out of your mind for the time being. You have faith in your evil minions, and the amount of subtle manipulation of impressionable children you have to do per day has recently doubled. Over the next few weeks, you start teaching the chosen one how to properly wield a sword. He’s a quick learner, and though you’re still much more experienced and can effortlessly defeat him in a serious match, you know from experience that minions tend to learn better from positive reinforcement, so you’re sure to point out what he’s doing well just as often as you criticize him. The princess sits in on many of your practice sessions with the chosen one, and though she shows no interest in wielding a sword herself, she does pay enough attention to be able to shout out advice to him mid-sparring match, which the chosen one says he doesn’t mind. The two of them were fast friends from the start, and having lived together for almost a month now, they’ve become quite close. Good, you think, rubbing your hands together menacingly. Strong bonds of trust between your minions makes them more powerful. Together with the two of them, you will conquer the enemy kingdom and expand your empire in all its dark glory.

“Maximush?”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full, Ethan. You’ll choke.” The princess chides.

The chosen one takes a moment to swallow his food. The three of you are having a picnic atop the all-seeing watchtower of evil oversight, enjoying the view of your land from high up.

“Maximus?”

“Yes, Ethan?”

“Everyone’s the hero of their own story, right?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“So why do you go out of your way to make yourself seem evil and scary? Don’t you think you’re on the side of good?”

You take a pause to think how to answer. “Oh, well, plenty of reasons, not the least of which being that it’s amusing coming up with overly complicated titles for all the more mundane aspects of my life. But I suppose it’s just that I decided that I didn’t need to prove myself to people who judge based on superficial things like appearances.”

The children watch you intently as you take a bite of your Dark Ham Sandwich of Broken Dreams. It seems they want you to elaborate. You swallow the bite, then continue.

“In my youth, I was feared and hated just by nature of the type of magic I used. Dark magic, they called it. It perplexed me, the superficial reasons for which they would argue that my magic was inherently immoral. Why was necromancy considered evil? Those people are dead, it’s not like they need their bones for anything anymore. Why do we have all these peasants barely getting by, working themselves to the bone in the hot sun, when we could re-purpose the skeletons of the dead and triple our crop output? And sure, demons don’t tend to be beautiful by conventional standards, but I’ve found that they’re fair to a fault, they follow rules to the letter, they have a strong sense of justice, and they enjoy games quite a bit. It seemed to me that they’d make stellar lawyers and government officials. They punish wicked souls in the underworld, yes, but the key word is wicked! I never understood why people frowned upon creating contracts with them. So, eventually, I suppose I gave up trying to fight their perception of me and embraced it instead. I decided I wouldn’t just use dark magic, I’d be a dark lord, king of demons and commander of an army of the undead! I began reanimating a lot of corpses to help me build my empire, had them work at night instead of in the day so they wouldn’t burn to ash in the sun. I recruited other black magi and taught them what I knew about efficient use of undead for manual labor. I started making contracts with hordes of demons, offering them reasonable pay and homes of their own if they’d come live and work in my empire. 200 years I spent building a nation from the ground up. Another perk of dark magic is that it tends to extend your lifespan. With necromancy, dead tissue can be reanimated, and after playing games with demons for fun for about 20 years you get good enough at it to be able to beat the grim reaper in a wager for your life with relative ease. Not that my dozens of active demonic contracts don’t make me functionally immortal in and of themselves. If I die, my contracts become void and all my demonic servants go back to hell, and I’m told they’d rather stay here for as long as possible if they can help it. No stars in the underworld.”

The children stare at you for a moment.

“Two hundred years?!” The princess exclaims.

“Is that why you never take that helmet off? Is it just a skull underneath?” The chosen one asks.

You laugh. You inform the chosen that no, it isn’t a skull, just rather grotesque. You promise to show them both once they’ve finished eating and you’re out of the sun. You burn rather easily in the day.

Later that night, you’re tucking the small princess into bed when she asks you something. She says she was always told back home that light was good magic and dark was bad, but all she’s ever seen light magic used for was to hide any visible bruises before she could make a public appearance, and from what she’s seen, dark magic seems to be the good magic. You pass her her stuffed animal and tell her that in truth there’s no good or bad magic. Magic is a tool, and any type of magic can be used for great good, or great evil. There’s no bad magic. Just bad people. As you blow out the candle and walk out of the princess’s chambers, she calls after you.

“Maximus?”

You pause in the doorway.

“I don’t think your face was that gross.”

“Yes, well I’m sure it was mere coincidence that Ethan threw up his lunch after seeing it. Goodnight, Penelope. Sleep well.”

RADISHN’T: Prithee, which one of you had planned to tell

Of diff'rent flavours gained by simple act

Of brewing tea with water hot, not cold?

MOTHMAN: Egad! you poured the water cold? Wherefore?!

FROG: An answer from you, Radish, I must beg.

RADISHN’T: Indeed I did, dear friends - why does this shock?

Without the guide of others I assumed

That heat was merely added for the sake

Of expediting this solution’s brewing!

Half a decade I have spent, or more,

Not questioning this worldview I had made.

In fact, I am myself a bit surprised

That you might think that I, your dearest friend,

Might have a patience of sufficient stock

To wait until a pot of water boils.

FROG: Three minutes overtaxes patience so?

The microwave will beep when it is done!

CATS'N: My friend, this answer vexes me the more!

Can it be true that thou dost boil by nuke?!

FROG: Are you in turn, my friend, so shocked to know

That I have not the patience, like our Root,

To boil upon the stove our favour’d drink?

CATS'N: It takes less than a minute!

FROG: On what plate?

Perhaps your dinner cooks atop the sun?

CATS'N: How long can take your stove to fill the task

Of boiling but a single cup alone?

FROG: In minutes?

CATS'N: Yes!

FROG: I counted seven, once.

CATS'N: Perhaps you ought to have your timepiece checked!

If on a middle heat you place the cup

You soon will have the scalding drink you crave.

Two minutes, in a mug upon the plate

Or even less, if you should have a pot.

FROG: You cause me tears - is this how thou dost live?

You place upon the iron stove a mug?

A mug, ceramic, filled with water cold?

How do these flames, though medium in height,

Not shatter like a glass this fragile thing?

Surely, then, your kitchen is bewitched

With magicks far beyond the mortal ken!

(The FOUR realise they have wandered into the THRONE ROOM. The ROYAL COURT watches with fascination.)

The fact that nearly every line is so metrically considered- near perfect iambic pentameter witb the occasional trochee for emphasis, but usually retaining a strong sense of rhythm nonetheless. And then the king comes in at the end, so wound in his disbelief that his response is reduced to prose.

And the even better thing about this is how easy it would have been to structure the king’s line into iambic pentameter: it is effectively already said as such because of the way wizardlyghost has phrased it, yet they haven’t!! They did not break the line, rendering what, by all typically of both Shakespearean canon and other periods context should be the character with the most command and authority in the whole play. If there was ever a more effective way to convey a genuine “what the fuck??”, I know of it not.

But it gets better!! Shakespeare regularly uses meter in order to represent class divide; the nobility usually speak in iambic pentameter, save for a few particularly chosen moments (e.g. Lady Macbeth’s descent into madness, Othello’s realisation of Desdemona’s “betrayal”) or just lines where Shakespeare needs to suggest high emotion or when a character is lost in thought. Supernatural characters like the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Witches in Macbeth usually speak in trochaic tetrameter, an inversion of iambic pentameter. Lower class characters, particularly those used for comic relief (usually under the influence of alcohol), speak with no structure at all: their language is plain prose. Therefore, if this is a conversation between these types of characters, as the prompt from silvergirachi suggests, why the hell are the characters speaking so eloquently???

Now, this is Tumblr. It is subsequently logical to assume that this may have merely been a humorous recreation (and a very good one at that) of the Shakespearean style in a way that is widely recognisable to an audience that may or may not have read a great deal of Shakespeare, which is understandable. However, logic is boring so I’m going to probe further into this to the point where future historians will look to this as an example of overanalysing.

The inherent eloquence of the characters here suggests an unusual subversion of the roles typically assumed in Shakespearean comedy. This could be interpreted along two major avenues: firstly, that the rhetoric displayed by the speakers is fundamentally representative of how truth can be expected even from the most seemingly pointless or ludicrous discussions. Furthermore, it could suggest that it matters not how well constructed your speeches are: if you talk bullshit, it’s going to sound that way despite your attempts to hide it.

This is similar but not identical to the second avenue of interpretation: there is the implication that the noblemen in the play are in fact the comic relief characters, therefore implying that the “common people” of the play are the ones whose influence, though not expressed in such a highly spoken manner, makes a lot more sense than whatever the hell this is. If this was a real Shakespeare play, I would call it a subtle exploration into the innate corruption of the rich and powerful. Well done, op.

In my Sociology class a few semesters ago, our prof had us break off into groups and, much to our naive joy, began distributing Monopoly boards! We had no idea what was going on but yay! Games! Of course, once our group, and a number of others, got the board we began to work at setting up and distributing the money…

until suddenly our prof told us to put the money down and pick up the dice.

“Roll the dice and sort yourselves from highest to lowest,” our teacher commanded.  "Now, the highest number is the upper class. The next one is upper middle class.  The next two or three are middle class. The last person is in poverty.“

Well, as the person who rolled a two this was startling and not wholly welcome news.

From that point the game changed entirely. We had to hand out the money so that the “upper class” had this fucking mountain, and then less for upper middle, even less for middle, and I didn’t get any triple digit bills. We would all collect different amounts from passing go as well.

The biggest change though? Going to jail. Upper class didn’t. Period. Upper middle class could go but they only had to stay for one turn or they could immediately pay their way out. Middle class had some pretty easy guidelines for when they could pay to get out. As lower class, it was really easy for me to wind up in jail and REALLY hard to get out. But since I was working with so little money when everyone else had so much I was in jail all the time because there was no “game over”.  If I couldn’t pay I had to go to jail for a certain period of time. I had to take out loans with interest I could never pay back just to get out only to wind up back in it again, rolling dice turn after turn hoping to be able to get out.

It was simultaneously the most enlightening and most awful game I had ever played. I was bored and frustrated and a little terrified about it all. And it wasn’t only me. I would never win, I sort of accepted this, but it was amazing how the middle classes reacted as well.  They were stressed. Because they were always that close to either being able to one-up the upper class or from crashing into poverty with me. They had to fight constantly just to stay in the middle.

Monopoly’s  original form of The Landlord Game which was explicitly designed to teach people about the unfairness of rent systems. To quote from the wikipedia entry, just as it’s the easiest source to hand…

Magie designed the game to be a “practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences”.[2] She based the game on the economic principles of Georgism, a system proposed byHenry George, with the object of demonstrating how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. She knew that some people could find it hard to understand why this happened and what might be done about it, and she thought that if Georgist ideas were put into the concrete form of a game, they might be easier to demonstrate.

All the letters, large and small case. Quartz veins in stone. Molly Montgomery collects natural unedited rocks on the beach creating an alphabet that took years.

don't interact with corporate tumblr accounts

yes even to dunk on them. i don't care if you have the sickest burn of the century lined up, don't even give them the time of day

And if that doesn't change, you may not believe it, but tumblr will close. Back in 2019, if Automattic hasn't bought it, I'm pretty convinced Verizon would have closed before the end of the year. This time, once Automattic says "we can't keep losing millions per month on this"... I don't think there will be anyone else willing to buy this hellsite, even for a single dollar.

Personally, I would prefer Tumblr to be paid by its own users and not being reliant on advertising. I work here, I could have almost everything for free, but I pay my own blazed posts and crab gifts because of this. But we are FAR from getting enough income from people subscribing, blazing or buying gifts. FAR.

And we are not talking about Facebook-like greed here, "Tumblr wants to squeeze us to make even more money!!!". We are talking about Automattic keeping Tumblr alive for three years already, losing millions and even if doing it costs a significant percentage of the income of the company. And no company would let something like that happens forever.

So if you like tumblr, if you enjoy this boiling cauldron of feral goblins, boicot advertisement if you want, but then toss a coin to your tumblr each month.

And it's ok if you can't, but then please, let people, or companies, blaze their posts in peace. If they bother you so much, just install an ad blocker.

There are several variations of "we have to keep this site unprofitable!!". And holy shit. Christ on a stake. Forgive my French, but me cago en la puta hostia como se puede ser tan corto.

Repeat with me:

You.

Don't.

Keep.

Any.

Site.

Unprofitable.

Because if it's unprofitable,

you don't get to keep it for long.

Full stop.

Do you know why Tumblr has stayed around for so long while being unprofitable??

Because it had been run by FOUR DIFFERENT COMPANIES IN THE LAST TEN YEARS.

So each one of those companies tried to make it profitable for two, three years and failed. And at that point, they just sold it to someone else to try.

The last time, Verizon sold it to Automattic for the business equivalent of a jar of peanut butter and a half-full cola bottle. Because they were going to close it anyway, so better to get that than nothing. And you know why Automattic could get it for cheap? Because. No. One. Else. Offered. Anything. Verizon announced very publicly they were trying to sell it and they got one (1) offer. Because purchasing Tumblr means you are purchasing a thing that puts you several million in debt PER MONTH.

So can you picture, can you imagine, what it will happen if the current owners decide that they can't keep having this thing that costs them so much money per month to maintain?? It has been owned by Automattic for three years already, longer than what it was owned by Yahoo or Verizon. Can you imagine what it would happen if they decide to stop losing money on this thing??

No, there won't be any new owner.

Big brands were advertising on the internet way before the hyper focused ads and data mining became The Way of paying for internet services.

If tumblr starts asking you to fill a profile with your personal info, ask you to connect your contacts, etc, that's the symptom of a turn towards an algorithmic advertising business model. But Tumblr could have done that at any point in the last 10 years and become a money-making machine like the other major social networks. And it didn't happen, for a reason: neither the current management nor the past one wanted to do that and they always have been trying to make Tumblr the platform that manages to succeed while respecting its user's privacy.

You know, I personally don't care about Marvel, but I have gotten blazed posts by Tor books and I was delighted. And if you think about it, marvel blazing its posts is EXACTLY what we want to happen all over the internet. Being realistic, we are not going to make this site to be 100% user funded for a long while, so ads are inevitable. That being the case, what's a better option than the brands sending their ads to everyone, without any segmentation, paying for N impressions and that's it. That was how internet ads were before Google and Facebook became the big brother and started selling our info to advertisers so they could convince your uncle to embrace fascism.

This is another important bit to understand: I would love tumblr to be funded by user donations, like ao3. The problem is... tumblr is not ao3. Let's left aside the "Tumblr is owned by a for-profit corporation" bit (Actually, it wouldn't be the first time that Automattic just open-source a project and donate it to its community to be maintained collectively), the problem is the type of platform both things are. Ao3 stores only text (I'm not an ao3 user, so please someone correct me if I'm wrong), but Tumblr ... well, doesn't.

To give you an example of what I mean: Based on its text limits, a single Tumblr post could contain the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy (well, you would probably need to edit it to be strategic with the paragraph breaks, but character-count-wise it could fit). And yet, that humongous post (suck that, colors of the sky!) would take about 1/20th of the space and bandwidth that any regular gifset post takes already. And it doesn't need transcoding of the images (so more powerful servers can do the job) nor worldwide data centers (you don't notice much if you are downloading 4mb of text from the opposite side of the planet... but you will if you are downloading 50mb of gifs).

tumblr is a for-profit site. at some point, if it doesn't make money, it WILL get shut down

since a lot of you cannot or will not pay for subscription (not saying that is not valid! just that it's not happening) the money has to come from somewhere else therefore,

(but really 2.a) unless you don't want tumblr turned into an algorithmic hellscape, leaving brands alone* is the price you pay.

Please note im saying leave them ALONE that means you do not need to engage with them! which is actually consistent with OP's post! You can just ignore them (seriously installing firefox with ublock origin and maybe xKit if you're feeling fancy I have never seen an ad on this site unless a mutual posted a screenshot. Never. Not one)

imo there is a big difference between a site "being profitable" and a site "turning its users into the product" and the latter is MUCH WORSE.