A Small Human in a Big Universe

Instead of apologizing for liking "trashy" media, consider: what is it doing well? If you like it, if it's making you feel pleasure and interest, then it must be succeeding at something. Is it shaping a set of emotional beats that you find satisfying to watch play out? Did it craft a character you find really compelling? Is something in the styling and aesthetics speaking to you? Did it unexpectedly resonate with a mood or experience you needed to see reflected right then?

However shallow or flawed a piece of media is, if you like it, it's because of something it did well - at least well enough to affect you, on the day that you encountered it.

There are a lot of good reasons to acknowledge this. One is about gratitude and manners: someone worked hard on that thing, and if they provided something that gave you happiness and pleasure, it's nice to honor that. Another is about breaking down the insidious habit of sorting everything into simple good/bad boxes. A piece of media, like a person, can do a lot of things wrong and a lot of things right, and the things on one side do not magically erase the other.

But the most important reason, I believe, is to get in the habit of celebrating what brings you pleasure and happiness. All your life there have been and there will be people telling you that you find joy in the wrong things, that if a particular thing makes you feel good it shows that there's something wrong with you. I reject that utterly. If a particular thing makes you feel good then there's something right, about you and about that thing. I'm not saying that pleasure is the only important thing or that every pleasure should be indulged indiscriminately. All I'm saying is that pleasure is in and of itself a good thing, and deserves notice.

Beagles on my brai n.... sm studies

lesnoj.veresk ~ Photographer

Ohlsdorf Cemetary ♰ [Hamburg, Germany]

— Kurt Vonnegut (via lazypacific)

There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared; an adult could not look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it generated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall. Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.

just finished up Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. the way she describes the Annaresti is so intriguingly just-slightly-alien and my imagination conjured this slightly muppet- esque image of Shevek early in reading that it refused to let go of.

I’ve read a few books recently that have me compelled to illustrate them a bit- I just finished TP’s The Monstrous Regiment and am of course dying to draw them, and on the Le Guin subject I want to pick back up my sketches from when I read TLHOD back in 2021

Computers are very simple you see we take the hearts of dead stars and we flatten them into crystal chips and then we etch tiny pathways using concentrated light into the dead star crystal chips and if we etch the pathways just so we can trick the crystals into doing our thinking for us hope this clears things up.

How does it feel to be the most Galaxy Brained person in this entire thread

Well that certainly belongs on the post

why would this distress you friend the dead star crystal chips are just singing to each other with invisible ripples in the fabric of reality itself perfectly normal stuff

i just finished Running Close To The Wind by Alexandra Rowland and it came at a very good time bc my job has been. bad lately. and apart from DIRELY needing every reminder I can get to stop working myself that hard for places that don't deserve it, i also have direly needed every little treat i have been able to scrape up

(also as someone who easily defaults to a lot of tunglr scrolling on my work breaks, it was very fun and neat to see my brain forget to tunglr scroll bc what it wanted most in the world was to get back to Pirate Book)

so yr honors may it please the court that @ariaste wrote a wonderful Pirate Book and it was bonkers and a delight and I also got one for my friend and I will be recommending it to my library and you can get it here

So we all know that on tumblr when people go "why is no one talking about this", the answer is frequently that people ARE, and the inquirer simply isn't following the right people. Today it occurred to me that there's an inverse to this situation, because I was like "I don't need to say anything, everyone's already talking about it." And no, *everyone* is not talking about it, I'm just following most of the people who would be.

So uh. Everyone should go read Running Close to the Wind by Alexandra Rowland. It's a queer book about pirates and it's HILARIOUS.

— Alexandra Rowland, in the acknowledgements of Running Close to the Wind

By weaving popsicle sticks together in a specific pattern, there is a build up potential energy (stored energy) in the bent and twisted sticks. When released from one end, this stored potential energy is converted into kinetic energy (energy of motion) as the sticks rapidly unfurl and fly through the air in a chain reaction.

Felix Vallotton

Sunsets, Sunrises 

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