algorithmicpoet - Tumblr blog

[algorithmicpoet]

[algorithmicpoet]

I think the funniest dynamic for arranged-marriage royalty would be a queen who came here 100% prepared to murder her future husband and rule as a widow queen in her own right, only to discover that the king is autistic as hell and responds to her wish to rule with "oh thank god please do, I don't want to be bothered by these people. I can just tell them to go bother you instead, if you really want that. I've got beetles I wanted to study."

[algorithmicpoet]

in the time loop the only way out is to leave her there but you don't ever leave her there, never in the roughly one thousand years you have been in the same day. it is probably like "50 first dates" but you haven't stooped so low as to watch "50 first dates" yet. (but who is to say what another thousand years of the same media will bring to you, maybe you will develop a new taste).

you spent about 200 of these years sulking in a bathtub or on the couch or staring at the seaside. 300 of them have been spent slowly mapping the geographical distance you can actually get before the time loop restarts. you have a list of favorite places: one library in Western Massachusetts called "The Bookmill", which has weird hours and has never raised an eyebrow to you arriving out-of-breath and panting, asking to see a specific book on a specific shelf. There is one beach without a name in North Carolina; it is an accident of geography and ownership title disputes - and it is pristine, untouched, warm and cozy. you've taken her on a lot of picnics there. Acadia National Park. One specific birdhouse in the mountains.

you were stuck in the time loop with the money you entered it with: not enough to rent a private jet. you've robbed a bank a few times, you don't like the way it ends. maybe next century you'll get the hang of it. you don't like the look on her face when you say hang on i have to stop at the bank.

you just have to leave her, and you can go back to being a person again. you took 5 years just catching a flight and sitting in the Grand Canyon. if there's one thing you regret more than anything, it's that you hadn't gotten your passport renewed before this fucking time loop. maybe you should spend some time learning forgery - but also, like, you look like an english teacher. nobody is going to be cool about you asking to see their paper printing machines.

the world is very big. that is one of the things groundhog day gets wrong. there are no consequences, so you have literally all the time (or none of the time?) in the world. in groundhog day, he does a lot of very cool things, but in reality - your muscle memory never gets better. you can't necessarily learn how to play piano or sculpt ice, because your hands never remember the practice. but hey - maybe you'll try violin next. drums. synth.

you can open any door and walk into any conversation. money isn't really an object. you can try every meal off every menu, forever. take her on helicopter tours and into every museum and on every event that is happening right-now at-this-moment. parades and funerals and calligraphy classes.

but you are somewhat trapped by the limitations of your body. if you were reading a book, you still need to get up and go back to the library and find that book again when the day resets. (thank god for the internet). it still takes like 2 hours to board a plane, and then takeoff and landing and traffic. you've gotten off to run around on the freeway. one of the little thankful things: since your brain isn't actually developing (it's a muscle too), the days thankfully don't feel shorter to you. that would be agony.

all you have to do to leave the timeloop is let that man get away with it. that's all. in every version of yourself - forever - you have stopped him.

the problem is that this experience has convinced you of the existence of the human soul. after all, how else are you forming memories? your very cells reset. information has to be transferred somehow. and if timeloops are real, you can convince yourself other magic exists. so you have two choices here: this hell, or the next. there might be a millennia where you have been worn down to the point you can accept fate's decision. this is just not one of them. ironically - she is the one thing you have left.

and besides! if you can't always find something new in your partner, aren't you failing them? there is something new about her, every day with the same morning. every brutal day with the same orange sunset.

after all, you wanted to live with her in heaven, in eternity, and, well - isn't this second-best.

[algorithmicpoet]

繕い　　(；ﾟДﾟ) ﾅﾝﾄｫ Mending a sweater

（Reddit:r/oddlysatisfying u/thegupeeman）

[algorithmicpoet]

what's that one thing where they asked how ripely from alien was so realistic and believable as a female character in scifi for once and they were like "well we just took the dude from the original script and made him a girl and changed nothing else. it works bc men and women are the same?" and people were like "woah no way" and then didn't learn anything from that for 20 years

[algorithmicpoet]

[algorithmicpoet]

we have GOT to kill tiktok/twitter self-censorship i just witnessed a grown adult say the word “smex” out loud to our professor

[algorithmicpoet]

I just really love potatoes. 

[algorithmicpoet]

I want to tell a story about a Santa and a fiddling Christmas Tree.

So I make costumes. Not your average fitted attire. I mean I do that too, but not just that. I make BIG costumes. Like with metal and shit. So about October-ish, I contacted a costume making studio that does work with a convention called “Dickens-fair”. Maybe You’ve heard of it. It is a Christmas fair that turns the whole center into a replica of Dickens’ London, complete with actors who represent his characters. I had always wanted to go and was just trying to think of ways to help out.

I contacted the head person for costumes for the actors and I told her I make period pieces and I specialize in weird stuff, but also in turning old thrift store items into period attire. She emailed me back and was like “Come meet me” and so I did. I came out to her studio and was sitting with her folks, showing her pictures of all the stuff I’d done I was proud of. Then she says…”Wait…I have an idea.”

She tells me that every year, Dickens-fair has this one performer who is a fiddling Christmas tree. Like What? yes. A tree…that fiddles. Apparently it’s like the fucking Mickey of Dickens-fair. Only, her outfit was made a few years back  from fabric, and kind of looked like a dunce cap with streamers. She told me that this year, the Fiddling Tree wanted a new costume. She says “Can you make a Christmas tree that can fiddle?”

I’m like…no. “If she can fiddle and wear a tree, then I can build a tree that can be worn by a fiddler. Hell yeah.”

And she’s like…”It can’t touch her shoulders, and it has to fit over her normal costume, and it has to be period accurate, so all period ornaments.” 

And I’m like…bitch, “I got this.” 

She says “Come back in a week and meet her and give us your idea.”

So I designed…because I make costumes and I have Christmas in my blood. My mom always tells this story about how when I was like 4, I was with her at the train station in LA and I saw this man sitting on a bench. Now this man wore blue denim overalls, with a long sleeved red shirt, had a white beard, and carried a wooden cane carved with Rudolph, who had a gemstone nose…He was fucking Santa. Admit it. And 4 year old me was like……SANTA? My mom always says I stared at him hard and then tried to climb in his lap, like for real Tim Allen from Santa Clause style, but he was cool, and pulled me into his lap and had a whole conversation with me about whether or not I was being good…in July. According to my mom, he told her he was a professional Santa and this was something he always got from kids, and that he loved it. He then got picked up by a woman in a convertible and drove away.

My mom has been telling me this story since I was five. 

So this year, about 3 years ago, I was like…A Christmas tree that fiddles…I got this.

I mean, I drew this shit. I went to hardware stores and craft shops and I priced out this shit. There were emails about what I could expect to be the substructure. I made a barbie doll scale model with pipe cleaners. I came in with a fucking Plan.

And they laughed and said… “We love the barbie…OK.”

So I had a budget. I had an idea. And I went with it. I made measurements and all sorts of stuff. Let me tell you about this costume…

This woman is 6′2″. She fiddles. She wears, beneath the tree, a full period costume. This means a bell hoop skirt and a corset. I made sure they had a hoop for her that was carved from fucking PVC pipe and a steel boned corset, and I went to work. I had frames…on fucking chains…from MY CEILING. I had the whole thing mapped out.

A lightweight metal skirt in a grid pattern made from chain, linked together in a mesh. gathered at the waist and clipped like a belt. Over the head, a cone-like structure carved out of mesh, mounted on braces that were lashed to the torso with straps bolted into the metal cross-braces. A light aluminum frame. And over this…a cape, made from long dangling chains. Every inch of chain was coated in weatherproofing green paint. Every few links…a limb hacked off a fake plastic Christmas tree. Woven amidst these? A series of handmade and donated ornaments, including fake cookies made from clay, fake candles with a remote control that controlled the flicker. I had paper ornaments, streamers, instruments made of brass, birds, candies made from plastic…I mean I had everything, and all to period. I worked and worked on this for months and had numerous fittings.

The aluminum headpiece came along. I was stressed. I didn’t know exactly how I was going to make this fucking cone mount on her chest so her shoulders would be free. I mean I had ideas - like a cone, but with a back and front piece that came down her torso and to which, straps were fixed that clipped at the sides. This would distribute weight evenly through the corset and allow for freedom of the shoulders. But! I didn’t have a firm plan. I went to the hardware store.

Me. Three months pregnant. All cute and glowy and shit.

And I walked into the section where all the plumbing and flashing is. Now I know my way around. I hate going here because I’m usually hassled by a dude who thinks girls can’t know shit about hardware. But this time…this time it was a nice old man with a snowy white beard, wearing a red shirt and a green apron. I’m like…he’s a Santa…this is fate.

He comes over and says “What can I help you with today?”

And so I tell him the whole story. About the tree, and the odd parameters, the physics, the complexities. I tell him what I’m trying to create, this cone of metal lashed to the chest, and he…

Smiles. 

He tells me, “I’m a Santa. I do it every year. I love this project! I want to help!”

As we are brain storming, and he’s showing me all the products that might work, he mentions to me that he isn’t the first Santa in his family.

“My dad did it for most of his life.”

“Man, I have such respect for Santas. My mom always tells this story about me meeting this man who looked like a Santa at a train station and trying to sit on his knee.”

The man got very quiet. “At a train station?”

“Yeah, like he was wearing overalls and a red shirt and had this carved cane…”

“I remember that cane,” he says.

I turn to him… “The one with Rudolph?”

“With a ruby nose. Yeah. After he died I looked everywhere for it, but I couldn’t find it.”

I stopped. Like straight up stopped moving, with like my limbs all cold as snow. “Wait a minute? What? Are you telling me you know that Santa?”

“I think that was my dad. He is exactly as you say. He worked on the railroad as a conductor for most of his life, and when he retired they gave him free travel. He was always taking trips, and he always went as Santa, because after he retired, he did that full time.”

“Did your mom own a convertible? Like a sleek one?”

“Yup.”

I lost it. I’m in the middle of fucking Ace Hardware, talking to Santa, about my Santa, the one I can’t remember, but always knew existed, and that man is this Santa’s daddy. And here I am…shopping for parts to a fiddling Christmas tree. I cried like a little kid. He hugged me. I apologized and told him I was in my first trimester. He said it was fine. He gave me his card. Told me he was glad to hear his father had had such an impact on kids. He helped me pick out my tree pieces and then checked me out.

I built the best fucking tree you ever saw. I wove metal. I bent aluminum. I used riveters. I worked with saws, and vices, and paint, and glue, and fucking plastic clay. I did everything wearing gloves and a mask because of baby. I did it all like I had a fire under me, because fuck that…I’m not letting Santas down.

And this is what I made.

This was the dry fitting, the trial run. We fluffed it out with more limbs, added bits here and there, or planned for more. I strung this fucking thing from my rafters on a mannequin and we had a tree decorating party, putting ornaments on it like it was a real tree. Then we had her put on the whole thing, and we watched her play “O Tannenbaum”

And it was the best Christmas moment ever, for me. 

That year, I had free tickets to Dickens-fair. I went and caught sight of my Christmas tree fiddling around, playing songs for kids and spreading the spirit. Then later I saw the fiddler dancing in Fezziwig’s ball, with her tree skirt still on over her dress. It was awesome, seeing this 7.5′ tall tree gliding around, this thing I made, with help from My Santa’s Son.

I was Santa that year. It made my holiday.

So the next time you meet a Santa… it might not be the real guy… but you needed to meet him. And if you are a Santa… this is what you do. This is your legacy.

Keep it up.

[algorithmicpoet]

Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008) is fantastic bc if you try hard enough it can really be about anything.  It’s about capitalism.  It’s about the horrors of the medical-industrial complex.  It’s about the ways fathers fail their children, and how their children can grow past them.  It’s about all the bizarre and self-destructive ways people get by in a world where human bodies, living and dead alike, are reduced to marketable commodities.  It’s about ripping that guy’s spine right out.  It’s about legacies of trauma.  It’s about the importance of giving Sarah Brightman a sick-ass solo.  It’s about self-determination and the struggle for bodily and moral autonomy in a corporate state.  It’s about what happens if you give a bunch of goths in 2008 an $8.5mil budget.  All of these interpretations are true and meaningful, but above all, you must always remember that Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008) is stupid as fuck.

[algorithmicpoet]

Heyy, you mentioned in some tags that accepting denny's did years of damage, could you elaborate on that?

back in the early/mid-2010s, denny’s did a lot of marketing on tumblr and was basically a prototype of the Quirky Relatable Brand shit you see all over twitter these days: staying on top of all the trendy memes, making #relatable jokes, generally being extremely “how do you do fellow kids” (but in such a way that the people running it were clearly pretty familiar with the site’s culture)

people on tumblr embraced it because that sort of online brand marketing wasn’t quite as ubiquitous at that point, and even if it was cringe, mid-2010s tumblr in general was pretty cringe (affectionate)

the success of denny’s on tumblr led other brands to try doing the same sort of shit on other platforms (the wendy’s twitter was a big one), and before we know it, we had marketing interns making obnoxious clapbacks, circlejerking each other, and aping depression to hawk fruit beverages

like how the Great Porn Ban caused a lot of the more obnoxious tumblr people to move over to twitter in late 2018, the brand marketing shit generally died down on tumblr as the ad agencies realized that the remaining userbase was there out of spite and generally not amenable to conventional internet marketing techniques

but now that everyone’s favorite techbro manchild seems hellbent on crashing twitter with no survivors, advertisers are getting skittish about twitter and will likely start testing the waters on other platforms - if/when they start posting on tumblr again, it’s important that people do not engage in any way whatsoever (even if it’s ridicule or silencebrand.jpg or kung pow penis) if we don’t want this sort of thing to happen again

[algorithmicpoet]

Okay fuck it if this post reaches 666k notes by the end of 2023 I'll practise basic self care

Why 666k? Because it's funny and impossible so good fucking luck

[algorithmicpoet]

I was sitting cross legged, my left knee turned into an mc escher staircase and I walked that thing for a decade. maybe three minutes passed but I swear it was a lifetime. 

it’s been fifteen years and never again

[algorithmicpoet]

[algorithmicpoet]

You know, when I see fictional characters who repress all their emotions, they're usually aloof and very blunt about keeping people at a distance, sometimes to an edgy degree—but what I don't see nearly enough are the emotionally repressed characters who are just…mellow.

Think about it. In real life, the person that's bottling up all their emotions is not the one that's brooding in the corner and snaps at you for trying to befriend them. More often than not, it's that friendly person in your circle who makes easy conversation with you, laughs with you, and listens and gives advice whenever you're upset. But you never see them upset, in fact they seem to have endless patience for you and everything around them—and so you call them their friend, you trust them. And only after months of telling them all your secrets do you realize…

…they've never actually told you anything about themselves.

[algorithmicpoet]

Welcome twitter users fleeing the absolute cesspool that twitter is going to become as Musk gets his way with his awful ideas! Things are better here, and hey, if you're an old user coming back, they've actually improved shit!

Here's a list of important notes for tumblr usage:

Don't censor words, particularly trigger warnings. Tumblr has a very functional blacklist (found in your settings) that can filter by post content and/or tags. But the word needs to actually be present for the filter to work. Censoring words like r*pe is actively harmful to people attempting to avoid those topics.

Use tags liberally, you have as many as you want, but don't tag unrelated shit. You'll get reported for spam really fast if you do.

Set an avatar and reblog things, otherwise you look like a bot.

You are not obligated to have your real name anywhere in your blog/bio/etc. Most people here use handles.

You can turn your ask box & anons on or off if you are experiencing any kind of harassment. You can also turn off replies on your posts, and turn off reblogs if you need to.

Tumblr has keyboard shortcuts on desktop. You can find them listed under the blog/account menu. Go learn them, they make life so much easier.

Reblog things. Seriously. Also set your dash in chronological order. You can maintain several blogs if need be, but reblogging things is normal, expected, and how you pass along stuff you enjoy.

The majority of people aren't reading your card/dni/blog bio before they reblog stuff. Posts get passed around and the OP often isn't the focal point of the post. Learn to live with it.

Fic writers: you have unlimited words, do not post fics as images.

Reblogs with comments/tags are encouraged. It's not like twitter's QRTs. The OP will see everything there. Know that before you comment.

You have a queue. This means you can set posts up ahead of time to run while you're busy. You can also completely ignore this and just spam your follows whenever you're online. Both are very commonplace

It's not weird to go through someone's blog and reblog old posts. That's actually very normal. If you add /chrono to the end of a tumblr page then you can view all the posts in chronological order to make this easier.

"Spam" liking and reblogging isn't a thing that is a problem. This is invented by people I do not understand. If someone claims this is a problem, they can learn how to turn off or manage their notifications.

The only form of promotional posts that tumblr has is "blaze". There is no ad targeting or any kind of invasions of privacy with blaze. You just get subjected to w/e someone wants to show you. If you want to give tumblr some money to help the company keep going and providing an alternative to twitter, it's not a bad way to do it. You can make people look at cat photos.

Also, we have fun colors here. Plus actual formatting ability. Use it!

People lie on here for fun. Don't accept everything you see at face value, check the reblogs/replies or google something if you're skeptical! Critical thinking is good!

Above all else, be chill, use your block button if you need to, and have fun.