“Use your gifts and your talents to greatest possible effect while you can. Spread joy wherever possible. Laugh at jokes. Tell jokes. Make puns and bugger the embuggerances. Read books. Read my books. You might like them. You might find something else you like even more than them. Look for these things in life.

Question authority. Champion good causes. Speak out against injustice. Do not tolerate bullies or bigots or racists or anti-intellectuals or the narrow-minded. Use your education to challenge them. Broaden their perspectives. Make the world you interface with a happier place.

These are your choices. Choices you have been fortunate to have been given, so don’t waste them while you have them. Don’t look back in years to come and wish you had grasped a fleeting opportunity. Grasp it now with both hands, Live. Strive. Love.”

from A Little Advice for Life taken from ‘Terry Pratchett: from birth to death, a writer.’

—Sir Terry Pratchett; April 28, 1948 – March 12, 2015

One of the greatest compliments I've ever received is that I resemble Sam Vimes.

Mind how you go.

Marcille discovers a peculiar "monster" 🫠

HEARTBREAKING: character actually mildly interesting to think about but I Dont like their fans

y'ever get haunted by the fear you will never write anything as beautiful as the US Steel Pipe Works Slag Dump Youtube Comment cuz hoo boy i sure do:

shoutout to you, youtube user mrc109, wherever you may be today

I love animals that are, like, the opposite of cryptids: we know for a fact they exist and have a clear idea of what they look like because we have photographs and individual specimens, but we haven’t the faintest idea where they’re coming from - they just keep showing up out of nowhere, and the locations of their actual population centres are a complete mystery.

hey white leftists

Fuck Israel and fuck everyone who still wants to pretend this is confusing or complicated. Is it really that hard to point out the "bad people" in a scenario where a multi-billion military apparatus is handcuffing and killing children and medical staff inside a fucking hospital?

I'm asking you because I've seen people ask you similar questions before. Why are kobolds, as a fantasy creature, so nebulous?

Generally when people say orc, goblin, elf, dwarf, werewolf, vampire etc. a person can have a pretty solid idea of what traits that animal will have. I guess because they're usually copying that species from the same similar source works?

What happened to kobolds? I used to know them as a kind of german folklore creature, but then also as a short lizard person, and most recently there's been Dungeon Meshi, which gives the name kobold to anthropomorphic dogs.

Well, the trick is that none of these terms have a standard definition. In folklore, the words "elf", "dwarf", "gnome", "troll", "goblin", "pixie", etc. are used more or less interchangeably – all of these words might refer to the exact same folkloric critter, and conversely, the same word might be used to refer to several completely different folkloric critters, even within the same body of regional folklore, to say nothing of how their usage varies across different regions and over time.

Literally the only reason any of these terms have "standard" definitions in modern popular culture is because one specific piece of media got mega-popular and everybody copied it. For example, Tolkien is responsible not only for the popular media stereotypes of elves and dwarves: he's responsible for popularising the idea that "elf" and "dwarf" are separate kinds of creatures to begin with. Similarly, while Bram Stoker's Dracula isn't solely responsible for cementing the idea of what a vampire is in popular culture, it did standardise what vampire magic can do, and it helped cemented the idea that a "vampire" and a "werewolf" are different beasties, which hasn't always been the case.

So the short answer is that there's just never been a mega-popular work about "kobolds" to provide a standard template for the type. Most modern depictions in Anglophone popular culture ultimately point back to the interpretation set forth by Dungeons & Dragons, but D&D itself has gone back and forth on the whether they're tiny dog-people or tiny lizard-people, with the tiny dog-person version being the earlier of the two, so even folks who are directly cribbing from D&D will vary on this point depending on which particular edition they're name-checking.

I think it is really important to praise yourself sometimes. You’re not the same person you were yesterday, you’re constantly learning from your mistakes & your experiences shape you into the person you are today. Be proud of yourself even with the smallest progress you’ve made so far..

LESS THAN TWO HOURS AGO: four cornell students have been suspended (and at least the one reporting was evicted, unknown about the others) for their involvement with their campus's gaza solidarity encampment. during a school year centering freedom of expression no less!

So what I’ve learned from the past couple months of being really loud about being a bi woman on Tumblr is: A lot of young/new LGBT+ people on this site do not understand that some of the stuff they’re saying comes across to other LGBT+ people as offensive, aggressive, or threatening. And when they actually find out the history and context, a lot of them go, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I never meant to say that.”

Like, “queer is a slur”: I get the impression that people saying this are like… oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?”

So they’re really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it. 

That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and  unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender. 

When “queer theory” arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.

And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.

But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and…” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.

But I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”

And that? That gives me hope for the future.

On the topic of conspiracy theories, I wish more writers were aware of how stuff like ancient astronaut hypothesis, Atlantis, UFO abductions, and the like fit into the scheme of far right conspiracy theories, and cared enough to make sure that their depictions of aliens and lost civilizations aren't repeating far right rhetoric. "People in government are evil lizard people in disguise!" isn't a silly meme, it's a conspiracy theory developed by a guy (David Icke) who claims Judaism and being trans were invented by evil aliens.

you ever just sit and realise u can’t remember 80% of your childhood? like … what happened? who am i ..?

My face is having uncontrollable spasms. Great. It hurts really, really, really bad.

I think part of why I have trouble explaining pain to the doctor is when they ask about the pain scale I always think “Well, if someone threw me down a flight of stairs right now or punched me a few times, it would definitely hurt a lot more” so I end up saying a low number. I was reading an article that said that “10” is the most commonly reported number and that is baffling to me. When I woke up from surgery with an 8" incision in my body and I could hardly even speak, I was in the most horrific pain of my life but I said “6” because I thought “Well, if you hit me in the stomach, it would be worse.”