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adult friendships are so dumb like yeah i think i can find a time to hang. how’s february 17th at 4pm

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Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell in Much Ado About Nothing

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The (final) musical number of Much Ado About Nothing

Hayley Atwell as Beatrice and Tom Hiddleston as Benedick

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hi i know “don’t believe everything you read on tumblr” has been said enough times at this point in the website’s tenure but i want to specifically say that there is a problem on tumblr and other social media where well-known science enthusiast accounts basically build trust as Knowing Things and then they can say anything they want about those things & everyone just believes them. this is especially a problem among ppl posting about ecology & animal science in my experience.

i’m absolutely throwing stones in my own glass house bc i almost never used to include sources on my wildlife science posts on my old blog but these days i try to make a point of it & i think others should too.

i don’t even think anyone is lying or making things up on purpose. i think they’ve just heard it from another source they consider reliable & they’re spreading incorrect or incomplete information without questioning it, to a much larger platform. about ten years ago I myself made a post repeating something a wildlife professor said to me, which turned out to be outdated info and mostly inaccurate. i trusted him as a source, but i should have looked at the data before sharing it to a wider audience. it was an important lesson!

basically idc how many times popular content creators on here or any other site/app have been correct about other things in other posts. you should still make a habit of asking yourself “what’s the source?” even when it’s a blog you like & trust. bc let me tell ya, i have seen some doozies lately

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My Wife: babe I think my dad might be autistic

Me: your face-blind, emotionally oblivious, picky eater of a father, who has numerous niche interests and the best-organized fly-tackle-box I have ever seen, might be autistic?

My Wife: you knew?

Me: you didn’t?

My Wife: babe I’m not ok I’m having a whole-

Me: you can hear the TVs, babe.

My Wife: What

Me, pointing at the special no-flicker lighting I installed in our house so that we never actually have to have the Big Overhead Light on: babe!

My Wife: … oh my god am I autistic?

Me:

My Wife:

Me: you didn’t know!?

My Wife: YOU DID!?

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The 8 Senses

The Autistic Teacher

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About ten, fifteen years ago I wrote a story about a guy living in a Capitalist dystopia. His walls, furniture, and tableware are all covered in smart displays. Basically animated wallpaper. It's sold as being able to turn your room or objects into anything - A nice forest view, outer space, a fantasy realm... but the companies that run this stuff keep sneaking ads in.

It gets so bad he's always being woken up by adverts that offer insomnia cures and better bedding that play when he tries to sleep.

So he buys the ad-free tier, and it's great... for a few months. And then he starts getting adverts from 'premium partners'. So he goes up a level... and the same thing happens.

So he jailbreaks his wallpaper and sends all the ad servers to 0.0.0.0 and voila... he can sleep.

Until this SWAT team blows his door off and drag him off to jail. The Ad companies are suing him for loss of revenue for the products he' notionally have bought if he'd watched their adverts, based on some weird 'The average consumer buys X products with an average value of Y' calculation.

The judge is like 'well I dun wanna annoy the sponsors' so he RICO's this guy's house and possessions and sends him to jail.

... which is a nice relaxed non-volent offender jail for the corporately disenfranchised. But because these people have no money... there's no ads and now he's happy because the only place he's free... is in prison.

Which at the time was a bit much and now it's like: Called it.

Elon's suing companies for not advertising because he's losing revenue. He's also cranking the price of Ad Free Twitter. Disney and Amazon play adverts on their paid service when services used to be free because of the adverts... and now you have to pay to watch the adverts or go up a couple of tiers.

And google's going around freaking out about ad-blockers.

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i hate pokemon

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"How might Small(tm) fantasy creatures use bows?"

Tiny bow was surprisingly fun to wield. Might use that again sometime 😁

Patreon still exists for all your art reference and bonus content needs!

And you can find more fantasy creatures doing archery here:

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It’s wild to me to see transvestigator conspiracy theories online that could be so easily explained by natural human variation. That woman has a deep voice? Yeah, sometimes they do. A woman has broad shoulders?? Maybe she plays rugby or hits the gym a fuckton. There’s a “bulge” in her tight pants?? Maybe her vulva is just fat. All the “markers” of trans woman that transvestigators use to harass any woman aren’t even things unique to trans women.

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I'm curious about people's levels of familiarity; I intend no judgment or elitism and it's absolutely fine not to be a completionist, btw. I didn't think I would've intended to have read them all at age 25; it just sort of happened that after I passed the halfway point in the middle of 2023, I came out of a reading slump and was motivated to finish. Fwiw I consider myself a hobbyist (I am not involved in academia or professional theater) but I realize that that label is usually attributed to people with less experience.

I also have always loved seeing other bloggers' Shakespeare polls where they put certain plays or characters up against each other, but I'm often left wondering if it's really a 'fair' fight all the time if you're putting up something like Hamlet or Twelfth Night against one of the more obscure works, like the Winter's Tale. It's not a grave affront to vote in those polls if you don't know every play, but I am curious about it.

Please reblog for exposure if you vote; I would appreciate it a lot. Also feel free to elaborate on your own Shakespeare journey in tags, comments, reblogs, because I love to hear about other people's personal relationships to literature.

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Valera Lutfullina, Racing

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eating popcorn is a coin flip. it's either the best most satisfying tasty snack ever or it's deliriously mid and you'll get thirty skins of corn kernel shrapnel stick in the most inconvenient parts of your teeth

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hello for the love of god hi. if you have a chronically ill/disabled loved one who is constantly flaking on plans, unable to attend events due to illness, please please please keep inviting them to things anyway. being excluded from events due to illness or the assumption that we won't be able to attend is the worst feeling, even if the assumption is true. a cursory 'hey we are planning to do xyz, i know this thing isn't always easy for you but we'd love to see you there if at all possible' truly means the world. better yet, make plans with your chronically/ill disabled friend in mind and help them navigate the accessibility of it all or choose what you do together. failing that, if you haven't explicitly been told to stop inviting them to things, continue to include them in your plans because being deliberately excluded hurts like hell

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Did you know that there's another Chocolate Guy called Kris Zhaokai?

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