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damn ok lake superior

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Do you ever just write something, whether that's a paper or an article or a fic, and you're just like "damn, I'm actually a good writer. That's some good shit" I just wrote a paragraph of a paper that felt like that and it is such a lovely feeling

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I will be 70 years old and I still will never have gotten over the time the Mythbusters used a rocket powered steel wall to - and I use this word as literally as possible - vaporize an entire car into red mist

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Oh holy shit they found Silphium alive and growing in the wild.

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Yeah you're right. It WOULD be pretty fucked up if you were a swan but you were raised by ducks and you grew up never seeing another swan or even knowing that such a thing as a swan even existed so you just thought you were a duck with something super wrong with it.

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• An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.

• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.

• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.

• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.

• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”

• A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.

• Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.

• A question mark walks into a bar?

• A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.

• Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out -- we don't serve your type."

• A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.

• A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.

• Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.

• A synonym strolls into a tavern.

• At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.

• A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.

• Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.

• A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.

• An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.

• The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.

• A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned by a man with a glass eye named Ralph.

• The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.

• A dyslexic walks into a bra.

• A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.

• A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.

• A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.

• A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony

- Jill Thomas Doyle

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somehow instead of saying "as a treat", I've started using the phrase "for morale", as if my body is a ship and its crew, and I (the captain) have to keep us in high spirits, lest we suffer a mutiny in the coming days.

and so I will eat this small block of fancy cheese, for morale. I will take a break and drink some tea, for morale. I will pick up that weird bug, for morale.

I'm not sure if it helps, but it does entertain me

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“No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writing is wasted: the words you can’t put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better.”

— ERIN BOW

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july side quests:

- buy a peach from a stand by the side of the road. (isn’t it sweeter than anything? i love you.)

- sit in a cool creek on a hot day. let it run over and around and through you.

- grieve.

- say “it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity that’ll get you.”

- get too damn drunk off of something sticky-sweet made for 17 year-olds to swipe at the barbecue, giggling. cry.

- sit out on the porch and watch the thunderstorms as they roll through every day before dinner. (we needed the rain, didn’t we?)

- grieve. it hangs in the air with the steam rising off of the pavement. breathe it in.

- disregard what your mother told you about electricity to stand tallest in an empty field and watch the heat lightning on the horizon. (i’m sorry. i know i shouldn’t. i love you.)

- stare into the night sky until something stares back. (there’s dipper, that’s the only one i could ever find. say hello)

- teach someone you love how to pull apart honeysuckle, petal-pistil-stamen-nectar-tongue.

- grieve. catch a firefly. let it go. (there are fewer of them than there used to be, when we were kids. i love you.)

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If I can recommend you do 1 low-effort thing for the love of God it is this:

Keep 5 cards in your pocket. One will say "yes", the second will say "no."

If you lose your voice, or lose speech, or want to make a dramatic embellishment at the right time, it is an elegant and efficient solution that is right there at hand.

But what if people question you from there? "Why do you have that card? Why would you do this? How long have you had that in your pocket?" For this, or whatever else they say, the third card: "I don't have a card for that."

"What the fuck," they ask. They laugh. They are bemused. You bring the energy back down with the fourth card: "I have laryngitis. I've lost speech. My throat hurts". Whatever you expect to occur.

The joke is over. Rule of threes. Now they are curious. They wonder about logistics. "How did you know I would say that? Is everyone so predictable?"

As a three-part bit, nobody ever sees the fifth card coming.

"I have powerful wizard magics."

Gets them every time

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Hamlet every fucking day:

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always thinking about the production of hamlet i saw at the pop up globe a couple of years ago where everyone was costumed in typical shakespearean dress and the set was fairly minimal BUT! they gave polonius an iphone. it was like a running gag that his ringtone kept going off when hamlet or claudius were trying to speak and they would get more and more impatient with him every time. the cast had perfect comedic timing and it was such a perfect modernisation of typical shakespeare humour

but oh my God. the nervous laughter that rippled through the audience when his phone went off behind the tapestry. the heavy silence that followed, interrupted only by the incessant chime of polonius' ringtone and a muffled "shit, shit!" while he tried to decline the call. it keeps ringing even after hamlet has already put his sword through him. hamlet picks it up in his bloody hands and ends the call, puts it back in polonius' grasp before turning back to face gertrude.

hands down the best set up and pay-off of any addition to a shakespeare play i have ever witnessed

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https://vm.tiktok.com/ZTdQuxw52/

I think I found my new favorite rabbit hole. This voice actor does Shakespeare scenes in a southern accent and I need to see the whole damn play. Absolutely beautiful

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Fun story, since many do you last saw me here on Tumblr, I've graduated with my bachelor's in English, and I'm on track to continue studying literature in my masters. I'm planning to study the literature of the English Renaissance for a doctorate before too long.

In short, I have become a certified Shakespeare nerd. I actually visited London in February to study Shakespeare! So yeah, that's my fun life update!

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This will never not be funny to me

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I just so badly want to nerd out about this so . . . . He does this because during the English Renaissance (aka the period during which Shakespeare write all his plays) playhouses were showing several shows a week and hundreds per year. There wasn't enough time for every actor in every play to memorize the entire script. Instead, they only memorized their lines along with a line or two from the preceding dialogue using what is called a queue text (they were given their queue and then their own lines). They also had very minimal rehearsal time (again due to the sheer volume of plays being performed) so there wasn't time to memorize a bunch of written stage directions. Instead actors would essentially improvise their actions based on what the dialogue told them to do, either subtextually or literally. If an action was especially important, then it would be written into the dialogue so the actor would know to perform that action. It also meant that the audience would know what was happening, because with minimal props, costuming, and set design, it wasn't always easy to know a character was invisible. Shakespeare's writing is based entirely out of the needs of the actors. Certain characters were written with specific actors in mind, for instance. It's one of the many parts of his genius as a writer that's less well known today because modern actors don't carry the same heavy expectations as Renaissance actors did.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

the funniest possible thing to happen in shakespeare plays is when he gives stage directions... through the dialogue. oberon just saying "i am invisible." leontes just directly saying that he's turning to the audience and talking to them. it will never not be hilarious