notjonathansims

[notjonathansims]

it is so important that you are a little bit ugly. please get comfortable with having unplucked eyebrows and nonexistent jawlines and wrinkles. let your blue hair grow out into an uneven pale green and your clothes be old and mend them and modify them until they’re unique to you. wear lipstick which doesnt compliment your skintone and mismatched outfits which went out of fashion 5 years ago. be a little bit too loud and a little bit too passionate and as weird as you can be because oh my god there is nothing more disturbing to me than perfection. beauty is manufactured and sold to us and you need to realise that you are a fucking animal to live a joyful life I am so serious. you cant obsess over aesthetics forever please just live messily and make your body your home however you please.

if you dont do it for you, do it for all the teenagers who will see u in the street and know that they are not obligated to be attractive

[notjonathansims]

when you start posting multiple text posts per hour tumblr should have a pop up that gives you the suicide hotline number

[notjonathansims]

The Good Place (2016-2020)

[notjonathansims]

pacific rim fucks severely for a lot of reasons but my favorite is that it opens with "the lizard aliens are unionizing so we built robots running on the power of love to fight them you got all that right" and before you have time to really process that concept bam gunshot body on the floor and the movie goes "now consider the vast power of grief in this setup" it never really stops considering

[notjonathansims]

someone might need to hear this

[notjonathansims]

Please don’t pirate books at least while the author is alive. I’ll make an exception for actual billionaires and wildly expensive textbooks you cannot afford yet need to complete your studies. I can’t make an exception for assholes, because we’re all considered assholes by someone.  I don’t know how many people realise how many writers who created successful, beloved stories and characters still die poor while other people get rich off the same work. I don’t think people realise that in the UK the current average yearly earnings for an author has nosedived over the last fifteen years to £10,500. That obviously is forcing people to quit writing. It increasingly means writing is a job for people who’ve inherited money or have wealthy spouses who can support them. I don’t know if people realise that in general, writers are poor and getting poorer. I’m sorry, but if you think widespread sense of entitlement to free books has nothing to do with that … you’re just wrong. 

I say I don’t think people realise - the truth is I hope they don’t, because the alternative is that they don’t care. That’s certainly the impression I’ve got from Twitter, where a truly horrifying number of people are arguing that copyright on  all books should expire after thirty years, and you should be able to acquire books for  free after that. This … would not just mean that everyone gets free books. It would mean if you write a book at 30, not only do you lose any royalties from it at 60, but Disney can take it, make a franchise out of it, Scrooge McDuck it up in a pool of money while you starve because writers don’t get workplace pensions.

Some threads on the unintended (?) consequences of this. I can’t go over it all again. John Brownlow NK Jemisin Michael Marshall Smith Me Marina Lostetter Kari Dru and others William Gibson and others

There are plenty of others. It’s not that this actual idea will actually happen, but I do think it reinforces the idea that it’s not only okay, but sometimes actually virtuous to search for ways to enjoy writers’ work without paying for it. Like it’s somehow a step towards a better world. Not just at the reader end, to be fair, at the employer end too. And I do see a lot of people here too who are all about supporting workers unless the workers are writers in which case fuck’em. 

Like. If you want to radically change society in such a way that mass-media conglomerates don’t exist and so can’t exploit us and we’re supported to make art in some other way than fine. But can you start the revolution with actual rich people please, not ask us to live right now, in the society we’ve got, without the money we need to survive it. Finally, a plea: I really, really, do not want to debate this. This whole thing genuinely makes me feel tense and shaky and sick. If you’ve got to disagree - unfollow me, block me, vagueblog somewhere I can’t see it. The Twitter version of this already has me feeling like I’ve been kicked in the gut. I didn’t want to write this post. I just felt I wasn’t going to have any peace until I did.

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[notjonathansims]

learning that addiction is a progressive narrowing of the range of things that make one happy was kinda life changing for me. i apply it to everything not even just addiction i am always checking to ask if i am narrowing my range of happiness or widening it

[notjonathansims]

huge shout out to this little kid for writing my favorite poem

[notjonathansims]

the thing about mr darcy. is that everything he does he does because of his eldest sibling syndrome. it's so important that he has a younger sister and it's so important that she's 16 and it's so important that their parents are dead. it's so important that georgiana is friendly and cheerful and that he hates everyone. it's so important that he loathes wickham for what he did to her and gets involved to stop him from destroying lizzy's younger sister's life. it's so important that he moves bingley away because he thinks he's about to get his heart broken. it's so important that bingley is a lot like georgiana. like seriously darcy is an asshole because he's an eldest sibling and he's so so sweet because he's an eldest sibling that's the whole point

[notjonathansims]

calling my lover "mine" but not in the way that my toothbrush or notebook are mine, mine in the way my neighborhood is mine, and also everybody else's, "mine" like mine to tend to, mine to care for, mine to love. "mine" not like possession but devotion.

[notjonathansims]

at this point i only feel safe in the company of internet perverts . these are like the only people left who you can count on to not let the fascism enter their body when they encounter a weird person

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[notjonathansims]

i'm listening to gathering moss, by robin wall kimmerer, and she is talking about a very odd job she was consigned to do, where an eccentric millionaire recuited her to consult on a "habitat restoration". when she arrives, the job they actually want her to do is to tell them how to plant mosses on the rocks in his garden. he wants it to look like a specific, beautiful wild cliff in the woods nearby, with centuries-old beds of moss growing thick and strong. she tells him it is impossible. such a thing would take decades to accomplish.

later, she is called back to look at the progress of the moss garden and is amazed by the thick, well-established mosses. how did they do it? she asks.

then they take her out to the woods and show her that they have been blasting huge chunks of rock out of the cliff, packaging them in burlap, and moving them to the owner's garden.

[notjonathansims]

the most annoying people are people who don't understand storytelling. they be like "oooo how convenient that this thing happened to the main character in the very beginning". yeah no shit. that's why the story begins here

[notjonathansims]