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the drowning machine

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hold on something just happened

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The thing that messes me up about the whole “the butler did it” trope is that we literally have no idea where it comes from.

The earliest known piece of detective fiction in which the butler, in fact, did it? Published in 1930.

The earliest known article calling out “the butler did it” as an egregious cliché in detective fiction? Published in 1928.

Obviously there must have been earlier examples of detective fiction in which the butler did it, but none of them have survived to the present day, leaving us in this bizarre situation where the earliest known callout post about the trope pre-dates its earliest known actual use by a full two years.

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Home Skillet made one heck of a knife there

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Safety inspection in the Mines of Moria.

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okay now I'm curious and I dunno if this is really such an archaic foreign thing to young people today or if I'm just out of touch

Please reblog, I'd love to see a lot of responses!

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Liga Kempe, Latvia - b.1975

Spruce, 2017

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healthy relationships are created, not found

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who’s pussy is this? (said with genuine confusion)

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fuck nudes, let’s just be enough for each other.

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The most helpful, hopeful take I've heard in the past year is this –

The apocalypse has already happened.

We're in a post-apocalyptic world.

It sounds like doom and gloom, but hear me out: How much anxiety and stress comes from anticipation? From fear of the Bad Thing happening? From wondering how to prevent it, making plans on what to do If Bad Thing Happens? Feeling an impending sense of constant doom?

Immediate pre-apocalypse is The Worst feeling. Frozen, helpless, demoralized. Waiting and Not Knowing if it'll happen or not.

Post-apocalypse, though?

There are so many scripts for that! We have so many post-apocalyptic movies, video games, novels, tv shows. The post-apocalyptic survival scenario is one that many people have thought through, told stories about, and played through in games or in writing.

What's the first thing you do in a post-apocalyptic survival setting?

Orient yourself to your environment. Take stock of your supplies. Review your starting situation.

Establish a base of operations. Maybe it's your starting position. Maybe you have to find a new spot because your current base is too risky, about to get overrun by zombies or plague or whatever. Maybe it's a temporary base because there aren't quite enough resources, but you have to gather resources before you have the strength and supplies to risk a move to a new base. But you have to have your safe-enough spot to return to from your exploring and supply runs.

Gather resources. Kind of happens alongside establishing a base, really. In tandem.

Secure allies, build community. You build a team. Small, individual relationships, one at a time. Rallying together in the dark. Can't be too picky in a survival situation, gotta set aside our petty differences and focus on what really matters for surviving and rebuilding. Think about any team of characters in any team-based video game. They're flawed, right? Messy. They have their own stories, they're imperfect, they don't always get along. You have to figure out how to work together anyway, right? It's no different here.

Or maybe you join an existing community, maybe someone's already done that work and you can join their ramshackle fort and find your place in it, figure out what else they need and how you can help. You already know it's not gonna be perfect – obviously, because this is a post-apocalyptic setting, not a farm sim. Just gotta hope they aren't cannibals or something.

But you have to start small. Local, usually, but this is a weird apocalypse and so there's still this virtual world that kinda works. Build your team. One-on-one, small group, small community.

Maybe then you can start establishing outposts. Additional bases, secondary bases. A new better base somewhere else, even. A network. Eventually you reclaim the map, bit by bit. And it's not safe, it's still a post-apocalyptic setting, but you can secure a fragile corner of it if you take it a bit at a time. And maybe it gets overrun by raiders or zombies or plague and you have to move again and rebuild again - that's how it goes sometimes, right? That's kind of expected. You don't give up. You grieve, you reorient, you gather supplies, you rebuild.

You know what you don't do in a post-apocalyptic setting, though?

You don't prevent the apocalypse. You can't. It's already happened. Accept the reality that you’re in so you can act effectively within it.

You don't reverse the apocalypse. You don't return the world to what it was before. You, as one person, can't do that.

You survive. You help the people around you. You build something new.

Sometimes, maybe, you make things a bit better. Sometimes a group of people can make things a lot better. Undo some of the worst effects. But the scars are still there. The loss, the grief. The pain, fresh and old alike. The shadows of how things used to be.

No one can return the world to what it once was. It's going to become something different. New growth amidst the rubble. Which has its own kind of value and beauty, its own wonder and meaning, and it still matters. There's still life and love and laughter after an apocalypse, there are still songs and art and play, and they're more vital than ever.

Survive and build anew.

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Possible unpopular opinion: treating having a special interest as equivalent to being an expert on the topic is another form of the savant stereotype.