the stars will shine and the sun will rise

1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
princesssarcastia
biggest-gaudiest-patronuses

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i have some questions yet i find myself too afraid to seek answers

zainekabang

dear god not the tumbleweeds

biggest-gaudiest-patronuses

completely justified response if you haven't encountered tumbleweeds firsthand (because most of us are only familiar with the loony tunes version) but in reality....

Photo of a two-story suburban house surrounded by tumbleweeds piled up past the first story.ALT
Photo of a two-story house. It is more than half covered by tumbleweeds, with a smaller pile on the roof.ALT
An suv covered, just, just absolutely covered--you know what no, it's not an suv surrounded by tumbleweeds, it is an OCEAN of tumbleweeds with an suv casually stuck in the middle.ALT

so the thing about tumbleweeds is they are in fact incredibly invasive. they cause millions of dollars of damage every year, and create serious traffic accidents and agricultural disruption. (they're also highly flammable, because of course they are.) the town in question was piled so deep, residents had to call 911 after being trapped in their homes. bulldozers and emergency workers had to be brought. it was wild.

tumbleweeds are also heavier than they look--they're made of wood after all. and they're big (most varieties top out at 4 feet, but there are larger ones that can reach up to 6 feet across. you know how the Emu War sounds absurd and fictional until you realize emus are 6 solid feet of clawed, beaked, avian dinosauric FUCK YOU? yeah, this is like that

Two workers working together to life a tumbleweed. The tumbleweed in question is significantly larger than the workers' combined size.ALT
biggest-gaudiest-patronuses

in summary, tumbleweeds are thorny, pollen-filled, fire-spreading assholes (and they can spread radiation from old nuclear sites), which means we are dealing roaming packs of stabby, poisonous, radioactive fireballs of death that can appear out of nowhere coming at you top speed down the middle of the highway!

the more you know :D

biggest-gaudiest-patronuses

in conclusion, please have this photo of the only tumbleweed i have any fucking fondness for (the South African Brunsvigia bosmaniae), solely due to the fact it's fucking PINK

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is it as evil as all its cousins? probably! do i care? that just makes it sexier! and the bulbs contain hallucinogenic properties, which makes perfect sense from a single glance:

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princesssarcastia
transjon

i’m not like an incest shipper (although like yeah me and 10k other people shipped wincest in 2013) but the more i see people absolutely losing their minds over the concept of fictional incest the more i laugh like come the fuck on now like this trope is quite literally hundreds of years old and we’re acting like it was invented by fanfiction writers. “richard siken condones incest” “ethel cain condones incest” you mean the artists who write about the rotten and the wretched and the unhealthy and the abusive enjoy digging into fictional relationships that are just that. have you lost your goddamned minds. do you ever read anything except for steven universe fanfiction. like could you handle a 12th grade english lit module on the god of small things.

transjon

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this person is over the age of 20 and has the literary analysis skills of a literal seventh grader

fiction =/= reality do i read/enjoy fiction w incest no no I don’t it makes me super uncomfortable and is a major squick to the point I often also avoid stuff where adoptive/step siblings are in a relationship but that doesn’t mean I get up in arms about people who do consume fiction including it reality check game of thrones had at least two major incest ships THAT I KNOW OF I didn’t watch it I got about six episodes in and all the rape and incest and various murder subplots started making it too uncomfortable for me to watch for the 3 or so characters I actually liked BUT it was one of the highest grossing tv shows of its time when it was airing it is an insanely popular and large part of our culture now there was a point where I was the only person I knew who didn’t watch it so like if what you consume in media = condoning it in real life wtf does that say about large swathes of the western population who loved got? hell what does it say about anyone who is a fan of pretty much any media based on Greek/Roman/Norse/Egyptian mythology (there’s probably others too but I don’t know enough about most other mythologies to actually definitely say that)
princesssarcastia
elumish

Every time I see something implying that a moderately robust exclusion-based filtering system means that you are able to avoid seeing anything you don't want to see (with a heavy implication of 'so stop complaining about what you see') all I can think is "this person doesn't understand people."

elumish

To clarify what I mean by this, because it's important to understand both when it comes to fanfiction research and when it comes to uderstanding how people think about their own writing:

  1. People don't all tag the same. Some of it comes from where/when you grew up in fandom, but some of it also comes from personal preference and how you think about tagging. Do you tag in a certain way to avoid spoilers? Do you think of tagging more as a trigger warning (exclusion) function or as a search (inclusion) function? Do you tag genre, trope, location, types of sexual activity, types of violence, etc.? How prominent does a relationship need to be for you to tag it? How prominent does a character need to be for you to tag them?
  2. When people write offensive things (by which I mean more "this story is actively saying/implying something offensive" than "a 'bad' thing happens in the story"), they are likely not aware that what they're writing is offensive. People don't think of themselves as racist! (or sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, etc. etc. etc.) If they aren't aware of it, they aren't going to tag it. And even if they are aware of it (e.g., if they're a proud TERF) they may still not to tag it (why warn against something you're proud of?).
  3. Sometimes the things that you personally want to avoid are things that it may just never occur to someone else to tag, because they're not "bad" as much as just your own personal squick or trigger. There are certain types of tropes/plotlines that I almost never want to read--but they're not necessary "standard" tags in fics, which means that sometimes I just nope out of stories partway through because I run into them unexpectedly. This doesn't mean that the person shouldn't have written them or even that they should have tagged for them, just that the most robust tag-based exclusion filter wouldn't do a damn thing to help me avoid them.

All of this is to say that, most if not all of the most egregious stuff I've read on AO3 wasn't tagged for. I don't even know how some of it would be tagged, and I don't know how I would know how to exclude for it. I certainly wouldn't have thought to exclude for it before I read it.

And to be clear, what I'm talking about here isn't "weird kink thing" it's "that time a fic strongly implied being atheist made someone evil."

princesssarcastia
pika-memes

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shinobicyrus

I think one of the consequences of getting older is finding out that your parents were kind of right when they complained about technology? At least you can see they weren’t entirely wrong.

I’ve been hearing from friends that it’s getting harder to find quality refrigerators that don’t connect to the internet. Why exactly does my refrigerator need wifi? Or even a computer, at that? Older fridges can last decades because they have so few failure points. They have one job and they do it well. 

I tend not to use my smart TV very often because the damn thing glitches and it’s laggy and too much of a hassle unless I am really committed to watching a movie in my living room. And the worse thing is...can you even buy a non-smart TV these days that isn’t secondhand? Are they even making ordinary...yanno...televisions that don’t need software updates and internet connections, anymore?

Someone in the comments of this post asked how bluetooth earbuds are forced and everyone pointed out that a lot of phones (especially iphones) simply do not have the ports to plug in wired headphones anymore. You must get the apple wireless headphones - and I think that’s the crux of the problem. I am glad I have an android phone because I can use the old wired earbuds I've had for over 12 years. If I wanted to, I could buy wireless earbuds and use them instead, because my model of phone gives me that option.

And that's the kicker: the problem is that as things are "advancing," more and more, options are being taken away. It has nothing to do with consumer demand - obviously there are a lot of people that are not happy with these developments. But as we’re seeing, the products being made don’t reflect customer preference or choice. It’s always about is best for the companies making and selling those products.

Every day we’re hearing about new apps and tech startups and really...does anyone really want this shit? Is the nth attempt to make crypto work, the billions spent on the Metaverse, doorbell cameras; is a fridge with an IP address really allow it to do its job better? Is that actually going to improve the lives of anyone who aren’t the developers of that product? Just the other day I was reading about a tech startup that wants to be able to beam ads into your car's GPS screen. Video ads! On a screen! To tell drivers what's nearby when they can just...continue to look out the window because they're supposed to be driving a goddamn car.

The problem of a world run by tech companies is that the tech isn’t being made to accommodate us, we are being forced to accommodate the tech.