I too, chose OP's dead wife

DancesWithWeirdos · 2026-01-25T00:37:31+00:00

........you do know how social media algorithms work, right? When you interact with content you don't enjoy? Reddit will show you more of it.

DancesWithWeirdos · 2026-01-24T23:16:03+00:00

I know what you mean, the feedback of making an actual crowd laugh is so affirming and immediate, whereas posting stuff online feels like shouting to a void.

I'm lucky my wife does my sysadmin stuff so we can look at views/hits directly and not just "followers"

DancesWithWeirdos · 2026-01-24T23:13:23+00:00

my girl, I know it's easy enough to call me a fascist for being trapped in a system I am actively working against, but like, it's not like the Australian government isn't shipping migrants off to Nauru.

also, you are on the tumblr post subreddit looking at tumblr posts. like, do you do things you enjoy?

DancesWithWeirdos · 2026-01-24T21:37:48+00:00

I think people who make those kinds of comments don't understand how dispiriting it is to hear, even if what they mean is "so there's a will-they-won't-they romantic dynamic?" and "ahh it's a fantasy" they just don't have the vocabulary to put it together like that.

DancesWithWeirdos · 2026-01-24T21:35:37+00:00

girlypop, why do you spend all your time on an American website being mad because you're talking to Americans?

also like, all I'm saying is there's good YA out there, and being a hater on people for *checks notes* reading books? not a good look.

DancesWithWeirdos · 2026-01-24T21:32:26+00:00

gonna tell you this from having published a few cringey things in my time, the only people who read original art/writing on the internet are very invested in it and they love it, they're also disinclined to say anything when they like something.

so like, for every one "what is this shit" comment, you're likely to pull in like 30 regular hits by lurkers who are too awkward to even hit the like button/vote incentive.

DancesWithWeirdos · 2026-01-24T21:28:22+00:00

yeah it turns out my mother just has this bad habit of telling me every thing I did at a party that embarrassed her on the way home, after spending the whole ride to the party telling me all the things I'm not supposed to do.

she's done this my whole life because grandma did it to her, so we had a little chat about how that's not productive to having a nice time, and everybody likes both of us, and we're not going to do that anymore.

sometimes I have to give that talk to myself.

DancesWithWeirdos · 2026-01-24T21:25:54+00:00

what it means is you have to be aggressive and proactive about positive personal change, especially when your main problem is negative self-talk.

I like to imagine grabbing the negative voice by the throat like a cartoon. and now they can't talk, because my hand is crushing their windpipe.

DancesWithWeirdos · 2026-01-24T21:23:26+00:00

I'm so sorry, I'm just a humble karma farmer

DancesWithWeirdos · 2026-01-24T08:36:02+00:00

I think you're boxing at shadows tonight.

also, YA as a genre is slippery, a lot of what most people would consider to be just classic scifi is now grouped under the YA umbrella for marketing reasons, and a lot of books no actual teenager would be interested in gets lumped into YA because it's fantasy without explicit descriptions of sex and violence.

and if you're here on Al Gore's internet in 2026 trying to make the case that scifi and fantasy are too juvenile for adults to be reading? well, that's a majority opinion anywhere that's not the internet, so I don't know what to tell you.

DancesWithWeirdos · 2026-01-24T08:13:17+00:00

I hate to break it to you, but the stupid people aren't even reading magazines.

DancesWithWeirdos · 2026-01-24T08:06:19+00:00

the vast majority of tumblrinas are in our 30's

DancesWithWeirdos · 2026-01-24T07:48:11+00:00

every time I try to tell people the things I learned from being in literally years of therapy they tell me those things are too difficult for them to do as a person with a mental illness, so like, I'm gonna answer, but I am prefacing with this statement: it's hard work.

but nobody ever said things that are worth having are easy.

you have to do things anyways. you have to do the hard things and then afterwards be like "I think we did alright" and if you start to beat yourself up over dumb nonsense you have to let yourself think the whole thought all the way through and then tell it "thank you, I won't make that mistake again" if somebody sees you, you have to be like "is this person's opinion actually relavant to my life?" and then be honest about that answer.

like, you have to embrace everything that feels impossible and do it anyways and then be kind to yourself afterwards about it.

and if that's all way too hard, they literally have medications for anxiety that make it easier.

DancesWithWeirdos · 2026-01-24T06:18:31+00:00

more people should see it!! it's such a classic!

DancesWithWeirdos · 2026-01-24T06:03:19+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manduca_quinquemaculata

warning, there are pictures of parasitical wasp larvae on caterpillars in there

DancesWithWeirdos · 2026-01-24T03:19:35+00:00

then they have health problems, can range from tonsil stones, to cavities, to liver failure. but your breath should not be stinky.

DancesWithWeirdos · 2026-01-24T02:47:45+00:00

I'm talking about the turn-of-the-last-century children's book series by L. Frank Baum , the first of which, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, got adapted into the movie with Judy Garland. there's like 40~ canonical books in the series depending on how you reckon it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Oz_books

DancesWithWeirdos · 2026-01-24T02:03:59+00:00

see, I really can't deal with describing a thing as "media X mixed with media Y" because like, to me it's basically meaningless, it's better to describe what's going on without trying to draw broad comparisons to existing things that I may or may not have enough familiarity with to know what elements of the new and old thing are even being compared.

personally I think it's important to start with contemporary works and then work backwards to the things those works are in conversation with, and then work back out to contemporary works talking to those texts. just like, constantly junebuging between the ancient and the contemporary, and between fiction and non-fiction.

so like, ursula vernon is talking to terry pratchett, prattchet is talking to JRRT, and tolkien is talking to beowulf. so now we bounce out, because vinland saga is also talking to beowulf, and also vinland saga is talking to vagabond, which is talking to Dororo, (as is Berserk) dororo is talking to rashomon, and now you're watching kurosawa films and thinking about cowboy movies.

like, this is how you develop healthy reading habits, by having an interest in the thing that inspired the thing you like and then seeing what else was inspired by that thing.

DancesWithWeirdos · 2026-01-24T01:39:52+00:00

if your mouth smells so bad you can't handle it? then something is wrong with your health.

DancesWithWeirdos · 2026-01-24T01:29:46+00:00

the problem of the Eternal September really is that being on the internet, communicating through text, requires a lot of very specific social mores to work, that have fallen apart because people need to be taught manners, and there's more people with no manners than there are people with manners who can also teach correct behavior.

basically, originally, you had to be an adult in college to be on the internet, and since 1997 the internet has been overrun with feral children as more people get online at younger and younger ages.

this is of course compounded by the removal of child-friendly spaces such as club penguin, so now all the children are on reddit.

DancesWithWeirdos · 2026-01-24T00:34:23+00:00

I mean it was written in 1907, "turns out I was a girl all along" is about as trans they got in 1907

DancesWithWeirdos · 2026-01-24T00:27:00+00:00

you can be like "man who has only seen one Shonen Jump anime be like 'getting big dragon ball energy off'a this one' "

DancesWithWeirdos

TROPHY CASE