[railroadsoftware]

did anyone actually ever read those animorph books

[sonypraystation]

just stared at the covers for a concerningly long amount of time before putting it back where i found it

[railroadsoftware]

me too

[the-emileighain-mountains]

Same

[bogleech]

Here are some of the spoilers you missed out on by not reading Animorphs:

• Five children are forced to engage in guerilla warfare, espionage and repeated murder to protect their loved ones from alien parasites as they wait for the other, heroic aliens to finally arrive. When they do, the “good” aliens turn out to not give a shit about humans, caused the whole intergalactic war through their own shittiness and are willing to exterminate whole planets themselves to get at their hated enemies.
  
• A child repeatedly experiences his intestines hanging out of his body while in various animal forms
• A child is mentally tortured until broken and never gets better
• A child in the form of a fly experiences getting splattered and smeared against a ceiling until his friends who are also flies at the time can peel his body off and take him somewhere he can transform back into a whole human before his insect mind fades completely
• A child is shrunken and experiences having her eyeballs digested out of her head inside her friend’s stomach while she’s in the form of a tiny elephant
• The heroes are forced to permanently imprison another child in the body of a rat because he knows too much and they abandon him on a tiny island with only other rats and garbage for company. Rumors circulate that the island is haunted but it’s actually his psychic screams reaching distant boaters.
• A race of devastatingly powerful, violent aliens turn out to be mental toddlers who don’t know what they’re doing and are just bred to think they’re playing one big game before they’re killed at age three so they don’t learn the truth
• An alien spends a few centuries hanging from the parasitic tentacle of a much bigger alien, surrounded by millions of rotting corpses attached to its other moon-spanning tendrils. They engage in mental warfare until one finally absorbs the other completely.
• It turns out another seemingly “evil” alien race is simply driven to kill and eat everything in sight because it was separated from its original world where food was continuous and the entire specie’s life is the torture of perpetual starvation
• A peaceful robot willingly removes its inhibition against violence to help in the war, only to slaughter a huge number of alien-controlled humans so gruesomely that nobody dares think about or speak of it again and it is the only thing left undescribed in a book series that already describes entrails getting torn out and skulls getting smashed
• A child stays too long in the form of a flea and instead of turning back into a human, accidentally turns momentarily into one big, giant flea that can only writhe and moan because it shouldn’t exist and can’t live at that scale.
• The kids discover Atlantis, then discover that Atlanteans are inbred mutants who paralyze any humans they find, dissect them alive to figure out how their organs work, then stuff the corpses as kitschy museum displays for their children.
• An ordinary ant gets transformed into a human child. It has no idea what’s happening and is so overwhelmed by its huge new brain and sensory input that it can only scream until it dies
  

[loveinthemindpalace]

What. The. Fuck

[pristinely-ungifted]

From someone who recently read/finished this series, NONE OF THE ABOVE IS AN EXAGGERATION.

[vanishedschism]

Also you can get all the PDFs here

[bogleech]

Everybody read some animorphs you know you wanna it’s right there

Go ahead and start on book one you’ll already get some juicy terror

[themathomhouse]

okay but if you ever see a male creative who had a string of great work and then everything else he did was dogshit, go to the "personal life" part of his wikipedia and look at his relationships. you'll either find a major tragedy he didn't recover from (completely understandable) or, more likely, there was a woman in his life doing uncredited shit editing his stuff or contributing generally and she's not there anymore.

I told a friend about this phenomenon in literature and he called me weeks later like, I remembered what you said about women doing uncredited work when tim burton came up. he made a string of bangers then everything else just was nowhere near as good. the timeline matches perfectly to when he was with this german visual artist (lena gieseke). he's done some good work in collaboration, but if things were dug into I suspect we would find she did a lot more than people realise.

so yeah whenever you look around like wow women didn't work in history, or, women aren't auteurs, or, there just aren't as many great female writers - societal reasons for that aside, half the time they absolutely did.

[shamebats]

Hell yeah

[kedreeva]

Can I have your attention for a minute

It's nothing bad!

I wanted to share a little website with you, one i have used in the past. It's called Future Me.

All it is is a little web based word processor, that you fill in a letter to your future self, fill in your email address, pick a date, and hit send. The site will store the letter, and send it to your designated email on your designated date. It's completely free, though they accept donations if you like the service.

I've used this site for YEARS, it's not at all new, but it has at times been a little bastion of hope and good things for me. Every year on my birthday, I send a letter to myself, and I receive the one I sent the year before. I write about what I've been through that year, what I've accomplished, and what my hopes are for the year to come.

I have cried every single time I've gotten that letter. I know it's from me, but by the time it comes around, I've usually forgotten I sent it. But... every year on my birthday, I receive a letter from Past Me, who cared enough to sit down and have hopes about my future. And it makes me want to pay it forward to Future Me, and dare to hope that she, too, will remember that someone cared a lot about her future, and choose to keep going even further.

Anyway, I am giving you the link now, because there are definitely going to be rough times ahead of us, but I feel like maybe writing ahead to Future You, to the You that has made it past the rough times, might make them ever so slightly easier to endure. Knowing that Future You is waiting at the end of the line to welcome you, holding onto the letters you sent.

FutureMe: Write a Letter to your Future Self

Write a letter to the future and read the public (but anonymous) letters from others. FutureMe has been delivering letters to the future for

FutureMe

[doubleca5t]

"male loneliness epidemic" is misleading because it implies that men are suffering because they can't get girls when I feel like the actual problem is that pretty much any online content that's aimed specifically at men conceptualizes the masculine ideal as what I call the Buff Scammer. there are only two things in this world that matter, says the Buff Scammer: being jacked and making money. how you get to either of those things doesn't matter, you just need to be as rich and as buff as possible or you have failed as a man. Get into drop shipping. Eat nothing but raw meat. Rugpull a memecoin. Remove seasonings from your diet. Sell an online course. Go to the gym daily. Starve yourself so your body will achieve ketosis and start burning fat. Attend a seminar on real estate investing. Work 80 hours a week. Take steroids but don't let anyone know about that part. Flip a YouTube channel after 10xing the subs. Sell AI art on Etsy and AI audiobooks on Amazon. What's that? You're trying to do this to get girls? Why would you care about women? Women are all stupid whores who don't help you get richer or buffer. The only people you should be paying attention to are other rich, buff men. If you do hang out with women you should be pimping them out on Chaturbate so you can at least get an ROI off your time spent not thinking about men. Male friends? You don't have time for friends. You should be hustling and grinding 24/7 365. And if you absolutely do need to spend time around other men you should only be spending time with other buff scammers so you can collaborate on entrepreneurial ventures. Like Jesus Christ even writing this is exhausting I feel like trying to be this dude would be fucking miserable like not only did you turn yourself into a friendless, materialist, misogynistic asshole who can only conceptualize the world in terms of value extracted but you're NOT EVEN HAVING FUN DOING IT!!!!!!

[redeless]

At some point in my transition, the "hate yourself, get an eating disorder, buy product" messaging I get switched from woman flavor to man flavor, and omfg. What the hell is this shit!

The "woman" version would often disguise itself as self care. There's this facade of softness and gentleness. ("indulge yourself: buy skincare! do what's right for YOU: starve yourself and smile emptily at zucchini noodles! this is empowering. your body is a temple, divine feminine chakra mother!!!") In the man version, no such thing. Self compassion is not allowed. You've got to brutally grind yourself into the shape of a Real Man or die trying, but you don't get to *enjoy* being the Real Man because comfort is for girrrrrrlllssss.

My dangerous trans gender ideology is that being a man should be enjoyable. If there's nothing fun about it, change your approach or stop being a man.

[elizabethwydevilles]

chewing on my bars rn

[frogandtoadpdf]

the best way i can think to describe the experience of reading moby dick is you’re in line at the dmv and this guy behind you very loudly says “well who HASN’T had a gay experience” and then proceeds to tell you every detail about his life in between anecdotes about how great sperm is and how ropes work and sometimes he’ll say the most poetic shit you’ve ever heard in your life and them jump RIGHT back into explaining how a whale is a fish because 1) it swims in water and you’re still only like halfway through the dmv line

[lakevida]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Letter from E.B. White to a man who wrote to him in despair over the bleakness of the human race. That's all I've got today, friends.

[kleefkruid]

The fun thing about picking up a cat from the street is that they know a negative amount of rules and will commit entirely new crimes

[strongermonster]

i taught a baking class for 12 year olds today and we made your garden variety chocolate chip cookies, but i’m a big believer in Questioning Everything and the who/what/where/why/when/how behind things, so the first part of the class was purposely letting the kids do things the wrong way, to show and explain why we do things the way we do.

“why do we bake cookies at 180 for 9 minutes when we could do 400 for 2 minutes?”
-enter the godawful lump of coal with a still gross wet and uncooked inside

“why do we have to scoop out little cookies instead of doing the whole tray?”
-ok well that one you can technically do if the spread is even. you just end up with one giant, structurally unsound cookie.
“PLEASE CAN WE MAKE GIANT COOKIES”
(we did make 1 giant tray cookie)

we talked a lot about why consistency is important, but i don’t think it really hammered home until i said “okay everyone gets ONE cookie, that’s fair, right?” and then handed out cookies of hugely varying sizes. + baked one fat lump of a cookie that still wasn’t done at the 9 minutes, vs the regular one i put in that came out charred by the time the first was actually done.

we also made a row of cookies where each one had one single differing ingredient omitted, like a cookie with no flour, or a cookie with no butter, and laid them all out on a single tray to bake together to see how each ingredient affects the outcome.

two of the little girls added cocoa to their cookie doughs until it matched the colour of each others skin to make best friend cookies, and that almost made me tear up a bit 🥺

got briefly distracted (…for over half an hour…) talking about how eggs form when someone cracked an egg and it had 2 yolks

expertly tolerated being asked how old i am (just turned 31 the other day) which was immediately followed by asking if i watched the moon landing live on tv

was so focused on keeping track of all the kids that in the end i forgot to make a cookie for myself, but it’s ok because one of the girls gave me this

tiny……….

[strongermonster]

the class went well and they asked if i wanted to do another one in a couple weeks and i said yeah, and they’re taking uh… fuck, what’s the word for inventory when it’s people?? attendance?? whatever, they’re trying to see who’s interested to get a feel of if it’d be 1 three hour class again or if there’s too many kids so we’d do a couple classes. anyways, i love the emails from Concerned Parents.

“will there be knives involved?”
we are baking cookies.

“what temperatures does the oven get to/will it be hot enough to burn?”
we are baking cookies.

“will there be [insert ingredient used in cookies]?”
we are baking cookies.

“are you using fahrenheit or celsius?”
??????? d-does it matter?? it’s going to get Hot. (also celsius; this is ontario)

“are the ovens childproof?”
no?? i’m assuming you’re asking if i’m going to let your kids reach into the ovens while i’m staring out a window in another room. i will not be allowing your children to use the ovens. they will not be left unattended. 

“why is the library baking class taking place at the high school?”
the library does not have 10 ovens. the library does not even have 1 oven. the high school has many ovens.

“what if i don’t want my child to have cookies? can you let her make muffins instead?”
this is a baking class for cookies. we are baking cookies.

“cookies aren’t healthy. why don’t you make [insert whatever]”
do you know how many cookies i can make with a $40 budget and a trip to the bulk store? we are making cookies.

“who needs a class to bake a cookie, why not teach something more valuable?”
IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT THE COOKIES, KAREN, IT’S ABOUT FAMILIARIZING CHILDREN WITH THE ART AND SCIENCE OF BAKING/COOKING/FOOD, ABOUT TRYING NEW THINGS, MAKING MISTAKES AND REALIZING THAT THE MISTAKES ARE NOT ONLY OKAY TO MAKE BUT VALUABLE IN AND OF THEMSELVES, FAMILIARIZING THEM WITH INDEPENDENCE, THE UNDERSTANDING OF HOW THINGS CAN COME TOGETHER TO FORM A NEW AND BETTER WHOLE, ALL WHILE HAVING TRYING TO INJECT A MODICUM OF JOY INTO THEIR LITTLE LIVES. SORRY THAT THERE ARE CONCEPTS AT PLAY YOU CAN’T SEEN TO UNDERSTAND HERE. MAYBE YOU SHOULD COME JOIN AND I’LL LET YOU MAKE A FUCKING COOKIE.

[woman-becomer]

GUARDS !! coat this fool in olive oil and allow them to rise overnight. come morning we shall turn them into focaccia bread

[satanfemme]

otherwise interesting post ruined by the bold insistence that you can never accidentally abuse someone & that all abusive people are self-aware evil masterminds

[satanfemme]

I don't think my parents are aware that what they did was abuse. in fact I think one of the reasons they abused me was because they lacked the self-awareness, introspection, and education needed to realize what they were doing counted as abuse. if they did have more self awareness &etc, they would have likely stopped. it is not productive to insist they woke up in the mornings with the intent to psychologically torture a kid for no reason, when that is self-evidently not the case or within their motivations.

I'm speaking annecdotally here but I think many cases of abuse are like this. I think when reckoning with the reality of how abuse functions in our society, you must come to terms with the mundanity of it including the fact that abusive people are primed to overlook the harm of their own actions through the shield of mundanity and (lack of) intent.

[queeranarchism]

"But abusers actions are often very good at isolating the victim, making sure the abuse is not observed by outsiders, etc." Yes. And that's compatible with not knowing that it's abuse.

"This got me looked at weird in the store so I'm only gonna do it to my kid in private from now on." is a thought people can have without the penny dropping, because most people really don't want to think of themselves as abusers. So abusers can have tons of moments like this without the realization that they are abusers.

In this way people who act abusive can, over a long period, develop habits that help them be abusive without realizing that they're doing it.