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the most fucked up fictional universe is all those mouse movies where mice have a secret society underneath human society where they’re fighting mouse versions of the same wars and have the same religious oppression and each have a human version of themselves

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We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

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TWO HOURS AGO: an incredible photo taken by a ut austin student capturing something deeply poetic in my opinion, a line of state troopers eagerly waiting to arrest student protesters standing just behind a sign that reads "what starts here changes the world. its starts with you and what you do each day."

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i think it's fucked up that there are plants that decided they wanted to eat meat

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I'm convinced it was a tragedy that tumblr learned the phrase "bury your gays" at the exact same time it decided that any fictional media darker than Landlord White was pearl-clutchingly problematic. Pouring one out for every creator of earnest LGBT+ media wanting to explore the themes of grief loss and tragedy who then got subsequently hounded by mobs of terminally online users brainrotted on nothing but conflict-free coffee shop AUs.

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Perhaps they ought not to have eaten the dragon. There had been people objecting to it at the time. Surely such meat was poisonous. Perhaps it was even an affront, an insult to some intangible order of nature they ought to honour.

But the city was starving, the siege had gone on too long, and the king's troops were still a week's march away. The scorched earth would be fertile again in time, but right now it was barren. Right now there were mouths to feed. So they changed their crossbows for butcher knives and got to work.

None of the royal commanders asked any questions that could not be answered. After all, their aid had come shamefully late. The dragon's horned skull made a noble gift, a fitting tribute from a triumphant city to its humbled king. Who would have thought to question them?

And none of the townsfolk spoke up, when the first golden-eyed babes were born. Children who grew up barefoot and fearless, clambering over the city's patched and rebuilt roofs like they had no notion of falling, with a strange glitter to their skin when the sunlight hit it just so. No one breathed a word about dragons.

Because soon enough there were deft, young hands taking loaves straight out of the oven, heedlessly lifting iron from the forge, plunging into boiling laundry water. And some of them more wondrous still, wild, warm-skinned youths, with inexplicable knowledge and peculiar remedies.

A blessing, their families said proudly. A blessing after so much hardship. Which it was, in its way. This city would never fear dragon fire again.

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Hey Dr. Tingle, I understand where you're coming from, it sucks that people are so irony-poisoned that they don't understand that your work comes from a place of true passion.

But I am wondering - are your book premises meant to be taken entirely seriously? Because I always thought that the titles and images, while not *bad*, where meant to be read with a sort of lighthearted comedy, like the titles you pick and the contrastive style of your art seems like intentionally sort of amusing in tone and rhythm? Is that correct, or completely off base? Because I do feel like that's where people get primed to read more of a joke into some of these things than maybe was intended, and I think that it's true for the people who do take the writing seriously that they find the context a little amusing, also, and I don't know if that's on or off the intended track from your perspective.

Hope that makes sense! I don't want to come across as rude or anything

yes my books premises are meant to be taken entirely seriously.

i would say tinglers fall into genre of magical realism and erotica. i do not think of them as comedy although i understand that many, if not THE VAST MAJORITY of buckaroos see them that way. that said i often lean into comedy or have funny moments throughout, but honestly that is the way of almost ALL stories. funny things happen in every genre, but that does not make all stories comedy.

to my trot, what defines something as COMEDY is intent. the goal of comedy is to make you laugh. my main goal with tinglers in NOT to make you laugh, so i do not consider them comedy.

HOWEVER it is important to keep in mind that i am not the expert on my art just because i made it. if a buckaroo laughs at tinglers they are not wrong. it is just as much their art as it is mine, and my interpretation is not the END ALL BE ALL. just because i made a piece of art does not mean i know it better than you do, or that my opinion on it is more valid.

tinglers can be whatever you want, and i am not hurt or offended if you laugh at them. that difference in perception is whats so beautiful and powerful about art.

i think a good way to look at what i do is this: i am an absurdist PHILOSOPHICALLY, but absurdism is so often associated with comedy that sometimes buckaroos who do not know about the philosophy can think they are the same thing. something being absurd does not automatically mean it is meant to be funny. my art is also joyful, and i think joy and humor can also be confused sometimes.

all that is to say, laugh all you want buckaroo. you prove love is real in your own unique way

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Half Goblin, half Hobbit.

Goblit.

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I was positive and optimistic about my trachea continuing to seal itself shut for over two years. It didn't make anything better. In fact, my condition is rather worse now due to iatrogenic complications from having 16 throat surgeries in 30 months. My positive attitude has crumbled. Nothing is worse now due to my lack of positive thinking, I assure you.

…There is also an entire cottage industry of alternative medicine gurus who are essentially selling the snake oil of positive thinking. Throw in a little dietary and lifestyle advice, maybe some magic energy, and you have the whole package. Anything, it may seem, is better than the stark reality of biology. Patients with serious diagnoses like cancer are extremely vulnerable, and make easy targets for selling false hope.

But most people advising positive thinking mean well, and they may really believe it. It’s one of those folk wisdoms that many people believe but happen to be wrong. There is a legitimate scientific question here – is there any measurable effect from having a positive attitude in terms of survival or perhaps quality of life? It’s not entirely implausible that there would be. Attitude may affect compliance with treatment, a better appetite and therefore nutrition, and improved sleep. More speculatively it’s possible that increased emotional stress releases corticosteroids that suppress immune function.

But this question has been asked and answered years ago. Here is one review from 2010:

“Claims about these areas of research routinely made in the positive psychology literature do not fit with available evidence.”

Perhaps the definitive study involved over 1000 patients with head and neck cancer, and found:

“No statistically significant univariate or multivariate effects were observed for emotional well-being, and there were no effects limited to subgroups. These results stand in sharp contrast to the prognostic value of a variety of demographic and clinical variables.” (Read more at link)

#chronically disabled #chronic illness #actually disabled #spoonie #chronic pain #positive mental attitude #positivity #this is bullshit

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In the fic I write in a roughly-vaguely-medieval canon, I have the scribes and lawyers take notes on wax tablets, like we know students did in bronze-age Greece and Rome. Easily erased, can use over and over again, sometimes they need a fresh coat of wax, and when you have the information you need with all the details correct, it can be transcribed by the record-keepers onto actual parchment and kept in the scriptorium. Information that needs to be retained permanently can then be bound into folios or, if it is incredibly important, into books.

Why? Because I cannot BEAR it when writers forget how time-consuming material culture was in the past.

In an episode of Outlander S1 I yelped and turned off the show when Jamie's character has his shirt ripped off his body for damn near no reason. Do you fuckers KNOW how many WEEKS and MONTHS of labor (BY WOMEN) went into that goddamn linen shirt??????? JFC. I could not watch the show after that.

okay what did i miss

(yes some of these overlap and some are suppositions. for example if parchment is always used for ephemera, rough drafts, notes, and never re-used or re-purposed, we can also assume that the author is unaware of wax tablets as a concept)

#paleography #bronze age #medieval #material culture #parchment #linen #outlander #my fic #fanfic #writing

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i love finding out how big this world is. my girlfriend has only visited boston a handful of times, but i grew up here. i told her we'd be going to do the tourist traps in salem, and she said - which salem?

to be fair to her, there are a lot of other states that have a town named "salem." and i think there's some evidence that the witch trials actually happened in what is now called Danvers. but the thing is - she thought "salem" was like, a made-up thing. there wasn't actually a salem, massachusetts - like there isn't a gotham city.

they don't talk about it that much where she grew up, is the thing! and this made me laugh. a week ago she was talking about her hometown and said something akin to "well the museum's kinda like the one in richmond," and i had to explain i still had no frame of reference for what the hell this museum was like.

i love finding out what knowledge i take for granted. i used to live with 5 other women. 3 of them were from south korea. they had to take, like, a solid fifteen minutes to explain their birthday system to my gay math-blind ass, laughing as they did.

that same month, our roommate from denmark taught me the danish word for wreath by accident - she'd been talking about decorations, used krans, and i'd been able to figure it out through context. i just picked it up and kept talking. our entire house used krans as the word. she came home and slammed the door one evening, mock-angry, shouting: you motherfuckers! it's a - a wreath!

and how often do you use certain words, anyway! i am cuban, so i was raised with certain spanish words sort of sprinkled in there; but never how you'd think. in middle school i asked someone to pass me the recogedor - in a completely american accent, like i was speaking english. i hadn't registered it as a spanish word. i mean, how often in school do you actually use the word "dustpan" - i'd only ever heard it in the context of cleaning my house.

there are places that you grew up that you, just, like, know. that you assume everyone knows. there are things and people and "common knowledge" that you have that, just, like. doesn't exist for me. i don't know what you call your public transportation system, but in boston we call it "the T". our train cards are called charlie cards because of a song where a father accidentally abandons his family, which was written because our system of transportation. in boston, most people would snort and say everyone knows that, kid.

i think you and i should go on a long walk - it's getting dark early these days and we need any sun we can manage. tell me about the first time you saw snow. tell me about the stuff everyone knows about your home. tell me about the cities "everyone's been to," about the food "everyone's already tried." who knows. maybe it will feel nice to you - watching someone learn about it for the very first time.

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I am obsessed with this idea

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yall the comedy wildlife photography results are coming out atm and

look

LOOK AT THIS LIL MAN

THANK YOU BRIAN MATTHEWS HOLY SHIT HES GOT SUCH A CASE OF THE MONDAYS

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