@creatures-in-posts

This creature is perfectly squishable ⭐️⭐️⭐️

*slowly reaches for the popcorn*

Team “I can hear the near silent hum of electrical appliances and the bubbles fizzing in the can of soda on the coffee table, but can’t watch tv without subtitles and processes conversation at 1/4 speed”

Everybody thinks my neighbour is doing some sort of Nightmare Before Christmas thing every year, but really they just don't feel like doing two separate front yard displays for Hallowe'en and Christmas, so come November 1st they stick a Santa hat on the skeleton and call it a day.

I sometimes wonder how often archaeologists trying to make sense of the traces of some ancient ritual end up completely wrong-footed because the only surviving example we have to work with was performed by somebody going "fuck it – good enough".

This you @vulpesmellifera ? 😁

favorite tweets

Why are British teenage girls so unhappy? Here’s the answer (Caitlin Moran, The Times, Sep 13 2024)

"The report, by the Children’s Society, found that British 15-year-old girls are the most unhappy in Europe.

British girls aged 10-15 are “significantly less happy” with their life, appearance, family and school than the average boy — and their happiness is still declining.

Boys’ life satisfaction, meanwhile, remains broadly stable. (…)

But I still didn’t have an “aha!” moment about why this so disproportionately affects girls until… I talked to some teenage girls.

It was at a party, and I went to vape with them on the patio. Because I take my nicotine like children do.

“Duh — it’s the boys,” one said when I brought it up, as all the others agreed.

“The boys?” I asked.

My last book, What About Men?, had been all about how much boys struggle these days: their loneliness; their suicide rates. I’d spent the past year feeling very sympathetic towards boys.

“Yeah, well, who do you think they’re taking out their unhappiness on? It’s us,” another girl said.

“One boy at school used to draw a picture every day of how ugly I was,” a third girl said. “Every day for two years.”

“They’ve all got ‘Rate The Girls’ polls on their WhatsApps,” the first said. “They mark you down for weight gain, haircuts, what you say.”

“But then, if you’re hot, it’s just as bad, in a different way, because they’ll be talking about how they want to f*** you.”

The girls discussed coping techniques. Bad news: none of them worked.

“The only way you can stop them is if you become ‘one of the boys’ and hang out with them. But then,” the second girl said with a sigh, “all the other girls call you a slut. Because you’ve gone over to the boys’ side.”

“Surely it’s not all the boys?” I said. “There must be some nice boys?”

“Oh, yeah,” one girl said. “But they keep their heads down. Because… well, look.”

She showed me the Instagram account of her friend. Under every picture she posted of herself — smiling in a new dress; with her dog — dozens of anonymous accounts had replied with the most rank abuse.

“Fat.” “Slut.” “You gonna try and kill yourself again, for attention?”

“They’re all boys from her school,” she said. “And look, this one boy tried to defend her.”

I saw a series of messages from a brave teenage boy, posting things like, “You’re all big men, leaving these replies under anonymous accounts.”

As I could see, this boy immediately became a target too. Mainly accusations that he was “white knighting” this girl: “You wanna f*** her, bro?”

“So,” I asked, “you don’t think it’s social media pressure to be beautiful, or the economy, that’s making girls so sad?”

“Well, yeah, them too,” the first girl said. “But, Monday-Friday, 9-3, I’m not on social media. I’m not… in the economy. I’m just with these boys. And no one talks about how horrible they are.”

I thought about another recent report, showing a 30 per cent ideological gap between Gen Z men, who are increasingly conservative, and Gen Z women, who are increasingly progressive.

I thought about Andrew Tate, who has nine million mostly young male followers — and faces human trafficking charges, which he denies.

And I thought: maybe these girls are on to something. Maybe more people need to vape with teenage girls and ask them for the school gossip."

To the people in the OTW Tumblr Inbox asking about how the OTW is responding to the American Election.

This is a separate post (and not a response to a specific message) because we all need to see it.

Folks have been asking Support (through the form) as well as the other social media mods, and we have now been given the following to tell you.

<3 Mod Remi

GOD BLESS PATTI LUPONE BECAUSE SHE SAID THAT WITH HER ENTIRE CHEST 😭🫡

Excuse me while I add Ms. Plaza to the chat 😍😍😍😍

The art history version of “you’d look prettier if you smiled more”

you know what? fuck this *un-smiles your painting*

HAD to keep @furbearingbrick 's tag:

He gave her softer eyes, bigger breasts, a sweet inviting smile, narrower arms and wrists, and a less emphatic chin. A complacent and Proper Maiden for his smug consumption.

That is NOT what the artist painted.

The artist painted the cleaned image. Thank goodness and highly skilled people that we get to see it.

I'm so mad that the restored version is cropped in the photos there. I badly wanted to see the whole background cleaned. That SKY. SHOW ME IT.

NEVERMIND. The fucker who added boobs and a coy smile also pasted on a whole strip of new canvas at the top and slapped a skyline on there. o_0

Wow. The Kind of Guy(tm) who would do that really hasn't changed.

My 2nd artwork for the 90's-anizine 💙Uranus x Neptune💚

I was dreaming it was you

a one song soundtrack

Simon and Wille were best friends growing up, absolutely unseparable. When Wille was sixteen his parents decided to move from Sweden to UK, and boys, even though they promised to talk to each other constantly, over the years just lost touch. It's not the end of the world, isn't it? Just childhood friendship. And if it was more for both of them at some point, neither said anything, convinced that's just a crush that would fade away, not worth risking a friendship over. And then Wille left and it was too late.

Years later Wille was 30, he built a life for himself, and if he still thought about Simon sometimes, no one had to know. He even tried to stalk him online, but neither of them had an online presence. It was better this way, looking at Simon's happy life (he hoped it was happy) from afar would hurt much more. And this? This was fine, everyone is longing for something, he got used to it, really.

One evening he was searching netflix for something to watch he decided on some coming of age drama. It was his favourite genre even though it always made his chest heavier with nostalgia for a while. But this series stirred something so strongly inside him, that before he realised he was making a tumblr account with a need to absorb everything about this story he could. Slowly he started taking to people, but never revealing too much private things about himself.

There was one guy, that he liked especially. They clicked immediately, talked for hours about fandom stuff and their shared (not so small) obsession, random work frustrations and writing. Because they both wrote, Wille was an English teacher and his fandom friend was a journalist. And both of them were also first time fic writers. And it was freeing and amazing experience to just write for fun or to process stuff and being able to talk about it with someone. At some point they decided to write something together, and childhood friends to lovers was a very obvious choice. It was almost canon, and the idea resonated with them really quickly. Wille never worked on a story this closely with someone, just sharing ideas and moodboards, talking for hours was almost intimate, but somehow so natural. When they got to the first explicit scene, they both wanted to make it beautiful and soft, something none of them got. Not that he or his friend had bad experiences, but it was nothing special. And in their story it had to be special. Not perfect, but sweet and loving, something you get only with the love of your life when you're sixteen. It all messed with Wille's head a little. He didn't know what to do with himself while he was mourning the love he never got to have. I was just that, nothing more, absolutely not a fact that this person that the talked to everyday was becoming one of the most important people in his life and he didn't even knew his real name. He couldn't fell in love with someone who he would lose, not again. They finished their story, shared it with friends. And then without any reason they both decided that they need a small break from writing.

They never shared details where they lived, nothing except countries, and UK and Germany were too far for a just casual meet up, so more details didn't matter. But when his friend told him that he had a work trip to London he had to came clear and ask for a cup of coffee together. The day couldn't come though soon enough. Wille was an anxious mess for a week then, so when he saw a head of curls in the coffee shop window he didn't think anything about it. But when he noticed a painfully familiar face leaning over a book, he couldn't move. His heart stopped, the world stopped, and there was nothing real, nothing except Simon. His Simon.

Moon Princess in a dress from Marchesa

How do some people stay fit (seemingly without effort)?

More importantly, is there anything we can learn from this that benefits us?

The good plot twists aren't the ones that are wild left turns out of nowhere, they're the ones that make all the other little things that didn't quite add up before suddenly click

funny illustrations by Shanghai Tango

more illustration in here.

These are so clever!