Baby Appa, soup for the soul
does the mortifying ordeal of being known guy know that his paragraph from a six year old NYT opinion piece about emailing pictures of goats to coworkers has become God Tier Tumblr Gospel ? like does he KNOW though
WOW thank you @inkstrangle for bringing it to my attention that as of last August, which is to say the chronological peak of the “mortifying ordeal” meme on tumblr, tim kreider absolutely DOES know and in fact wrote an entire brilliant essay reflecting on the phenomenon:
But what I wish I could tell all those children of the internet, holed up in their rooms, isolated online, is that they can only imagine the worst of relationships: they think that what another person will learn about them is what they see in themselves — the squirming, icky, insecure mess inside. They don’t know yet that the ways in which they’re secretly screwed up and repulsive are boringly ordinary. The issue isn’t that you’ll be despised for who you really are — that, as a friend and I used to say about girls we were dating, “she’ll realize.” It’s scarier than that: it’s that you lose control over who you are. Other people get to decide. And it may turn out that you’re not who you thought you were.
As an artist, you don’t get to decide why people love your work. […] I would describe my reaction to seeing my writing reanimated as meme as “nonplussed,” maybe “bemused.” It always does some slight violence to a writer’s intentions to yank a sentence out of its context and present it as if it were a complete, isolated thought, like a maxim or commandment. I am not in the business of pretending to be in possession of any wisdom, or of telling other people what to do: this is the realm of self-help and advice writers — in other words, of charlatans. Part of me worries it’s an indictment of my prose that it should lend itself so well to Tumblr memes, the digital equivalent of needlepoint samplers. […]
But the things people love about you aren’t necessarily the things you want to be loved for. They decide they like you for reasons completely outside your control, of which you’re often not even conscious: it’s certainly not because of the big act you put on, all the charm and anecdotes you’ve calculated for effect. (And if your act does fool someone, it only makes you feel like a successful fraud, and harbor some secret contempt for them — the contempt of a con artist for his mark — plus now you’re condemned to keep up that act forever, lest she Realize.) My last girlfriend found my flaws, the things that annoy even me about me, amusing. When you break up with someone, you don’t just lose them, but a version of yourself. You don’t even get to know what your children will remember you for; it probably won’t be what you thought were the important moments. […]
As The Velveteen Rabbit teaches, we don’t become fully real except in other people’s eyes, and in their affections. At some point you have to accept that other people’s perceptions of you are as valid as (and probably a lot more objective than) your own.
As someone who’s living in an area pretty close to the coronavirus outbreak in Italy, let me enlighten you with some of our best memes yet:
Political compass
could you really ride a jackhammer like a pogo stick like in cartoons or is it just another sorcerers trick
The Addams Family renting out rooms in their huge mansion cheaply to broke college students.
The students digging it because the craziness and the bugs are pretty much the same as any other dorm house. Also, Morticia and Gomez treat them all like visiting cousins, not like tenants to abuse and exploit.
One of the tenants is a creative writing major and Gomez and Morticia house them up in the tower because of the quiet and the inspiring view
They’re supposed to be working on a typical coming-of-age story but after living with the Addams for just a week the project is becoming a horror-Gothic-romance
They go to their room after classes one day and find Thing correcting the grammar errors in the manuscript with a red pen
and yeah, the students pay roughly market value for their rooms, but that doesn’t stop gomez from shouting “capital idea!” and handing them wads of cash when they tell him about their weekend plans or what they’re researching, so they basically end up living there for free
In the same vein, half the them have to turn into exceptional fencers, because Gomez just doesn’t give a shit, and if he sees you in the library, its fucking Sword Fighting Time.
Fester and Pugsley find out one of the college students is trying to get into chemistry and woo boy, there has never been a faster study of how to counter various acidic chemical reactions due to “water” balloons in campus history.
Morticia and Grammy are keeping the horticulturalists on their toes with their Black Tulip/Rose hybrids, which can flick their barbs a foot away from their stem system. But it’s fine, one of the kids has managed to breed Aloe with the anti venom.
Lurch makes sandwiches for everyone who’s too much of a coward for Grammy’s cooking. Any music major will find him looming over them, utterly stone faced as they practise until they finish, when he’ll smile, and slowly applaud.
And the spookiest thing of all
Wednesday and Thing will find your thesis. They will critique it in every way imaginable.
There is no escape.
I especially love the idea of Gomez spotting a student in the library, throwing a sword at a startled student, shouting, “En garde!” and lunging at him/her with a sword of his own.
Student (later in life), when asked how she jumps from quietly doing research to handling a sudden influx of ER cases so quickly and easily, says, “When you have to snap out of deep concentration on biochem to fight for your life then get back to biochem without losing your train of thought…you learn or you die.”
This has made me laugh so hard-
Some kid in 4019: Hey, look at this weird construction of an ancient civilization. My universal translator says it reads something like “This is not a place of honor.”…?
Some other kid: Oh yeah I’ve heard of this. It’s a dank meme from the 21st century
First kid: What does it mean?
Second kid: Fuck if I know, let’s go inside.
oh no
Honestly the whole system is doomed to fail there is nothing u can say or do that will prevent humans from looking inside a locked box. Even w people knowing what is inside nuclear containment areas people today would still go inside to look if we werent here actively preventing them. Pandoras box is not a moral tale its just a description of what humanity is like. The only way to stop people from going somewhere u dont want them to is to make it physically impossible for them to get there and thats a lost cause if youre working on a scale of 10s of thousands of years.
Pandoras box is not a moral tale its just a description of what humanity is like
Exactly.
“Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying ‘End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH’, the paint wouldn’t even have time to dry.”
- Terry Pratchett, The Thief of Time
“‘And there’s the sign, Ridcully,’ said the Dean. ‘You *have* read it, I assume. You know? The sign which says “Do not, under any circumstances, open this door”?’
‘Of course I’ve read it, said Ridcully. ‘Why d'yer think I want it opened?’
‘Er… why?’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
‘To see why they wanted it shut, of course.’*
*This exchange contains almost all you need to know about human civilization. At least, those bits of it that are now under the sea, fenced off or still smoking.
–Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
“Probably the last sound heard before the Universe folded up like a paper hat would be someone saying, “What happens if I do this?”
-Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times
Pterry had a lot to say about humans being Like That. (And for a while he worked as a Press Officer for an electric company that had several nuclear power plants, right after the whole Three Mile Island thing - bringing us full circle to the original post.)
the hold my beer gene took us so far as a species. and yet.
literally just the office if it were set in a kitchen
The BA test kitchen is the only thing keeping me clinging on to this life.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it looks to me like this is a puppet and there is a person inside the cloak? Very creative and skilful work!