#literalism

[attemptsupon]

Must start with:

"Tell me," they said,  "not a story but a plan,"

with the sun shining down  on us as if we were

only anything ornamental. Our  day flowers open to show:

"Free line; use  however you like!"

oh, and we like how our  togetherness pertains to dreams,

reckoned not in clanging conversation  but in an onomatopoeia.

The figure of you is in blossom  like a Hanna-Barbera character:

hearing you repeat one word three times,  again again again

repeated as if a natural phenomenon,  a storm so unavoidable on

earth our shelter. Safe and  weak like nakedness in sharing;

even now that I found you,  and the title of one of your favourite songs

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

"They never admit how they have come to stop taking it literally. You have all these people criticizing us for our crass literalism – we’re as fundamentalist as the fundamentalists – and yet these moderates don’t admit how they have come to be moderate. What does moderation consist of? It consists of having lost faith in all of these propositions, or half of them, because of the hammer blows of science and secular politics.

Religion has lost its mandate on a thousand questions, and moderates argue that this is somehow a triumph of faith – that faith is somehow self-enlightening. Whereas it’s been enlightened from the outside; it’s been intruded upon by science."

-- Sam Harris, "The Four Horsemen"

Moderate religionists love to forget that it's only thanks to a decades and a few centuries of erosion of the scripture that they don't live in a world that for hundreds and even thousands of years held these assertions to be literally true.

Your god didn't tame your religion. Your religion didn't even tame itself. Believers tamed their own religion, but only once it became impossible for them deny what we figured out to be true.

[absurdlyalive]

I feel robbed when encountering literalist readings of media because they can also be extremely prescriptive. "No, you can't watch this, because it's violent, and violence is bad", say such readings often. "A character in this show is abusive, abuse is bad and therefore the show is bad and should not be watched."

What these stances stir in me is a panic that I can't openly talk about or share my love for stories that I can empathise with BECAUSE they are chaotic, violent, tragic and painful.

In a social context where people argue for how terrible it is that a show depicts a character being cruel or abusive, I feel unable to say that I think it's good that the show goes to that length because it makes me feel understood and seen in having encountered that or similar violence - and gone on to think it was normal. I feel unable to note that I'm glad they humanised that character, too, because everyone I know who was ever cruel was also just another person.

I love media that show and contextualise things that are fucked up. You can't protect people from trauma by forbidding them from seeing themselves in such media and their depictions. What you do by taking them literally, however, is stifle imaginations and ways that people with trauma can express themselves and connect to the world.

[thebacklogreviews]

The end of Dark Souls has been contentious for years, but I think we’ve been looking at it all wrong. 

In this obscenely long essay I talk about lore hunting, literalism and why Vaatividya is an actual criminal - enjoy! 

[youzicha]

Freud spent the summer of 1895 at Schloss BelleVue[3] near Grinzing in Austria, where he began the inception of The Interpretation of Dreams. In a 1900 letter to Wilhelm Fliess, he wrote in commemoration of the place:

"Do you suppose that some day a marble tablet will be placed on the house, inscribed with these words: 'In this house on 24 July 1895, the secret of dreams was revealed to Dr. Sigm. Freud'? At the moment I see little prospect of it." — Freud in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess, June 12, 1900

While staying at Schloss Bellevue, Freud dreamed his famous dream of 'Irma's injection'.[4] He analyzed the dream as expressing an unconscious wish to be exonerated from his mishandling of the treatment of a patient in 1895.[5] In 1963, Belle Vue manor was demolished, but today a memorial plaque with just that inscription has been erected at the site by the Austrian Sigmund Freud Society.

The plaque was put there in 1977, which seems a bit ironic because at that point I think even Freudians no longer really believed that he had revealed the secret (Anthony Storr, in Freud: A Very Short Introduction says ”today, very few psychoanalysts support Freud’s theory in its original form”), so it doesn’t seem like the sincere vindication that he was hoping for.

The German original just says “here”, it doesn’t talk about a house. Given that there is no house, I think the English translation could have avoided some awkward questions by following the original more literally...

[definitelynotaskinwalkeripromise]

why is ao3 is blocked on the hospital wifi????

[gabrielora]

When I was younger and researching the autism diagnosis criteria and symptoms, I thought “oh I couldn’t POSSIBLY be autistic.” Because when I read “takes everything literally” I thought it literally meant EVERYTHING and I was like “I don’t take EVERYTHING literally, just most things!” And I just realized the other day that it didn’t actually mean EVERYTHING and that was an overstatement.

[clandestinegardenias]

My therapist just told me my problem is that I need to write more fanfiction.

[apollos-boyfriend]

having such an obvious favorite character trope is life ruining bro

[ms-demeanor]

hey, don't cry. one cup heavy whipping cream, two tablespoons granulated sugar, three tablespoons cocoa powder and whisk until stiff peaks form for three ingredient chocolate mousse, okay?

[navysealt4t]

60k mentally unwell jay ferin. i want her

[just-spacetrash]

the 'what if you played it a little risky' post literally Changed my life but i cant fujkign find it in my blog because its. a tiktok screenshot

[emo-56]

garf :3 💜💙

[stuckinapril]

“why are you tired? you haven’t done anything all day” the simple fact that i exist drains me. hope this helps

[bluejay757]

[spooksier]

passages that make you whisper "oh my god"