I don’t get why stupidly rich people want to build massive hollow empty mansions to live in. What’s the point of having a 16-bedroom house when you don’t even have eight friends. These people don’t know what to do with that kind of money. If I had the billionaire kinds of cannot-be-spent-in-one-lifetime stupid-ass amounts of funds, I know exactly what kind of place I’d like to live in.
I’d build an university. A real, whole thing, enrolling students, funding research, hiring professors to teach there, the infrastructure needed for everything. All with my own private residence on top, almost like an apartment, with a balcony overseeing one yard on one side and another one opening up to the inner yard, so I can drink my morning coffee while watching whatever they’re up to at any time. Maybe have some secret pathways and hidden nooks here and there around the building, so I can sneak by the public parts of the building unseen if I please.
And then just wander around the place whenever I haven’t got anything else to do. Attend random lectures, browse through the library, have a chat with a janitor, just go watch whatever the students and staff are doing. Free to wander anywhere I please - if you’re doing something that explicitly demands for no human interruption, the “DO NOT ENTER” sign must also explicitly clarify that this also includes me. Because otherwise I’m going to come in and have a look at whatever art or experiment you’re doing.
Why would anyone want a big, gaunt and empty mansion or even some hideous modern equivalent when you could be a founder of a place of education and be the local cryptid in it.
Trans people who don’t want corrective/gender-affirming surgery are valid, but you know what? I think everyone who wants some should be allowed to have some surgery, as a treat. Shit feels great, getting something you’ve hated forever finally fixed and waking up every day knowing that it’s gone for good. Freaking gone.
Life’s short and you get one meat suit. You’re allowed to get it tailored.
I’m done with tattoos, but if there’s one I’d still think would be funny would be to get a really, really small heart somewhere - as small as could be done crisply, ideally the size of a largeish mole. In dark brown, the colour of a mole. So people will look at it and go “huh, you’ve got a heart-shaped mole!” but stop themselves before they say anything because obviously if I’ve had it my whole life, I’ve heard everyone comment about the heart-shaped mole and surely I must be sick of it.
But it is not a heart-shaped mole. It’s a mole-sized tattoo.
I have wanted this *exact thing* for decades, only star-shaped, right on my wrist where I can look at it all the time. I’m pretty sure that when I get my next tattoo (uh, maybe sometime this decade?), I’ll ask the artist how much they’d charge for a mini second tattoo.
Welcome to the future, where you don’t own anything and the stuff you rent stops working once your phone has no signal.
App powered car? 🤦♀️
I wish people remembered the age old wisdom that if something doesn’t absolutely require an Internet connection to function, it shouldn’t be connected to the internet - same goes for apps.
WHY IS A CATFOOD DISPENSER CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET
Sometimes I’m glad that I’m too poor for my “cool future stuff” monkey brain to be set loose to buy stupid shit like this.
please please please do not buy into the Internet of Things. Digital displays for appliances are one thing, but you shouldn’t need the fucking internet to do your laundry or use the fridge.
The Ring: If I had a quarter for every time a hobbit picked me up, I’d have two quarters. The Ring: Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.
Of all the bearers of Sauron’s ring, 4 of them were hobbits.
I was wrong. It’s 5. Not 4
The lineage of ring bearers is as follows.
Sauron.
Isildur
Deagol
Sméagol
Bilbo
Frodo
Samwise
I love how Deagol counts as a ring bearer even though he had it in his possession for all of like five seconds
He held it for the rest of of his life!
[Image description: Tweet by @banalplay saying “but something happened then that the ring did not intend. it was picked up by the most unlikely creature imaginable: a hobbit, the same fuckin thing that just had it for like 500 years.” End Image Description.] Link to original here. Otherwise reblogging for the final rb there, which made me cackle.
From the ring’s perspective:
1. Home, the finger of my creator and other self.
2. Well, I don’t like it but I can work with this. Cause some trouble, get some revenge, find my way home, this is fine.
3. What the fuck is you?
4. Right personality, wrong species, I don’t know what you are but I hate you and I don’t know why you’re so resistant to my powers.
5. NO NO NO there are goblins everywhere how did I find another one of THESE horrible things. This one’s even more resistant than the last one and also disgustingly nice. I suffer.
6. Listen, I’ll cooperate, just get me the fuck out of this hellhole full of small cheerful people my power doesn’t work on properly. No, not like that. I hate you. Please stop.
7. FUCK
8. (Frodo again) I still hate you with every molecule of my mortal form but at least you’re not number seven. Think I’m starting to get through finally.
9. (Smeagol again) YES it’s you I actually missed you now get me back to the Master and NO FUCK NO I HATE YOOOOUUUUU…. *fzt*
you CHAIN The One Ring?! you chain it like the prisoner?! oh! OH! trauma! deep psychological trauma for hobbits for One Thousand Years!
Feel free to reblog from the source and ignore this addition but I just wanted to add to this for people who truly do not get it:
Society tries to trick fat people into thinking their lives will get better when they’re skinny because “you’ll feel better skinny because your body is healthier” and shit like “you’ll act more confident and people respond better to confidence.”
This is to absolve themselves, on a personal level, of fatphobia. It is to say FAT PEOPLE make their own lives harder and skinny, midsize, even other fat people do not make it worse. The fatphobia is made up, not real. Not systemic. Not a constant in interpersonal relationships.
This is a lie.
I lost about ~40% of my body weight. Some of the kindest, least judgmental, socially aware, anti-discrimination people almost immediately started treating me better. I could even just MENTION that I was trying to lose weight, that I had only lost 1 pound, 5 pounds, 10 pounds (while still being “obese” by arbitrary medical standards) and people would treat me better.
Again, these are people who never, ever used fatphobic language. Who never shamed me out loud for being 214 pounds. Who I thought loved me to the best of their ability.
And it made me realize… everyone is fatphobic until they actively unlearn fatphobia.
If you think you aren’t fatphobic, I assure you, you are. And I think you need to mentally check yourself when you are interacting with fat people.
Are you withholding affection? Are you avoiding touching them when you’d touch someone else? Do you immediately try to avoid certain activities with them? Are you PUSHING activities onto them that you think will make them less fat? Do you avoid clothes shopping with them and going to stores with clothes for fat people? Do you avoid gifting them clothes because you don’t want to ever talk about sizes with them?
What do you avoid talking about with fat friends?
Do you complain about your own weight, “feeling fat?”
Do you push YOUR insecurities onto your fat friends?
Do you avoid being seen with them?
What are you excluding fat people in your life from?
Do you have internalized biases? Do you quietly think to yourself that they’re eating too much, that they’re lazy or selfish? Do you assume they’re unhealthy? Do you blame them for what they’re going through?
Do you make it clear you’re willing to listen when they want to talk about this?
What do you do to make sure the fat people in your life know you love them AS IS?
And I was put in the seat instantly, of course. I said, “your honor, I can’t be a juror on a two week trial, I have opera rehearsal.” And she said, “opera huh, well, sing something for us.”
And I did. In a federal court of law, in front of the judge, 75 jurors, the lawyers and the fucking DEFENDANT, I sang o mio babbino caro.
YO I DIDNT EMBARRASS MYSELF IN FEDERAL COURT SO YALL CAN DOUBT ME.
I know a lot of opera singers, and singing a full-on aria in a court room with only a hint of provocation is EXACTLY what they would do.
I know a lot of judges, and demanding an impromptu opera solo on a whim is also something they would do.
(And also one of the main reasons you can be excused from jury duty is economic hardship–basically, it would cause you unreasonable financial damage. If you’re a professional singer, a two week gap in your rehearsal schedule could do that for sure.)
As a muso, I absolutely believe this. I’ve got my accordion out of my carry-on and played a tune when airport security couldn’t recognise its weird mass of levers. Singers and musicians are just Like That.
Accurate.
My friend got stopped at the Canadian border coming back into the US. Border patrol took one look at his tattoed, ear-gagued, mutton chop wearing, hipster self, and said “I don’t believe you’re an opera singer. Sing something for me.”
His wife immediately put down her knitting and plugged her ears, because Matt’s a contrabasso, and he does NOT sing quietly.
Every other booth along the border stop had a head poking out of it within twenty seconds. And they let them pass without further contest.
The unwillingness of some people to believe that literally anything remotely interesting happens in other people’s lives is truly astounding.
Can we all please just take a moment to appreciate that OP’s url is literally @melodramaticsoprano and yet she still was doubted?
My boyfriend is trying to explain cricket to me again. “He’s only got two balls to make 48 runs”, he says. The camera focuses on a man. Underneath him it says LEFT ARM FAST MEDIUM. A ball flies into the stands and presumably fractures someone’s skull. “There’s a free six”, my boyfriend says. 348 SIXES says the screen. A child in the audience waves a sign referencing Weet-Bix
The first time he showed me this I assumed he was pranking me
if people haven’t been exposed to cricket before, here is the experience. The person who likes cricket turns on a radio with an air of happy expectation. “We’ll just catch up with the cricket,” they say.
An elderly British man with an accent - you can picture exactly what he looks like and what he is wearing, somehow, and you know that he will explain the important concept of Yorkshire to you at length if you make eye contact - is saying “And w’ four snickets t’ wicket, Umbleby dives under the covers and romps home for a sticky bicket.”
There is a deep and satisfied silence. Weather happens over the radio. This lasts for three minutes.
A gentle young gentleman with an Indian accent, whose perfect and beautiful clear voice makes him sound like a poet sipping from a cup of honeyed drink always, says mildly “Of course we cannot forget that when Pakistan last had the biscuit under the covers, they were thrown out of bed. In 1957, I believe.”
You mouth “what the fucking fuck.”
A morally ambiguous villain from a superhero movie says off-microphone, “Crumbs everywhere.”
Apparently continuing a previous conversation, the villain asks, “Do seagulls eat tacos?”
“I’m sure someone will tell us eventually,” the poet says. His voice is so beautiful that it should be familiar; he should be the only announcer on the radio, the only reader of audiobooks.
The villain says with sudden interest, “Oh, a leg over straight and under the covers, Peterson and Singh are rumping along with a straight fine leg and good pumping action. Thanks to his powerful thighs, Peterson is an excellent legspinner, apart from being rude on Twitter.”
The man from Yorkshire roars potently, like a bull seeing another bull. There might be words in his roar, but otherwise it is primal and sizzling.
“That isn’t straight,” the poet says. “It’s silly.”
“What the fucking fuck,” you say out loud at this point.
“Shh,” says the person who likes cricket. They listen, tensely. Something in the distance makes a very small “thwack,” like a baby dropping an egg.
“Was that a doosra or a googly?” the villain asks.
“IT’S A WRONG ‘UN,” roars the Yorkshireman in his wrath. A powerful insult has been offered. They begin to scuffle.
“With that double doozy, Crumpet is baffled for three turns, Agarwal is deep in the biscuit tin and Padgett has gone to the shops undercover,” the poet says quickly, to cover the action while his companions are busy. The villain is being throttled, in a friendly companionable way.
An intern apparently brings a message scrawled on a scrap of paper like a courier sprinting across a battlefield. “Reddy has rolled a nat 20,” the poet says with barely contained excitement. “Australia is both a continent and an island. But we’re running out of time!”
“Is that true?” You ask suddenly.
“Shh!” Says the person who likes cricket. “It’s a test match.”
“About Australia.”
“We won’t know THAT until the third DAY.”
A distant “pock” noise. The sound of thirty people saying “tsk,” sorrowfully.
“And the baby’s dropped the egg. Four legs over or we’re done for, as long as it doesn’t rain.”
The villain might be dead? You begin to find yourself emotionally invested.
There are mild distant cheers. “Oh, and with twelve sticky wickets t’ over and t’ seagull’s exploded,” the man from the North says as if all of his dreams have come true. “What a beautiful day.” Your person who likes cricket relaxes. It is tea break.
The villain, apparently alive, describes the best hat in the audience as “like a funnel made of dove-colored net, but backwards, with flies trapped in it.”
This is every bit as good as that time in Australia in 1975, they all agree, drinking their tea and eating home-made cakes sent in by the fans. The poet comments favorably on the icing and sugar-preserved violets. The Yorkshire man discourses on the nature of sponge. The villain clatters his cup too hard on his saucer. To cover his embarrassment, the poet begins scrolling through Twitter on his phone, reading aloud the best memes in his enchanting milky voice. Then, with joy, he reads an @ from an ornithologist at the University of Reading: seagulls do eat tacos! A reference is cited; the poet reads it aloud. Everyone cheers.
You are honestly - against your will - kind of into it! but also: weirdly enraged.
“Was that … it?” you ask, deeming it safe to interrupt.
“No,” says the person who likes cricket, “This is second tea break on the first day. We won’t know where we really are until lunch tomorrow.”
And - because you cannot stop them - you have to accept this; if cricket teaches you anything, it is this gentle and radical acceptance.
I don’t have notes enabled in my tumblr activity so sometimes when I open the app it just shows me one of my own old posts (that’s gotten a note within the past 30 seconds) and then vanishes. Today it showed me the gracklesong cricket graphic.
