To all of my california friends who can’t miss fireflies because they haven’t ever seen them.
^ what? do they not have fireflies in CA??????????
Nope! They don’t really live west of the rockies. The first time I saw them in Ohio, I thought I was hallucinating.
The fireflies were the most fantastic part of my first visit to America. I was with my BF and my roller derby team and we were in one of those yellow schooll buses being taken back from the tournament venue. I spotted some lights in the bushes and pointed it out… then we all lost our minds!!! As it got darker we saw there were SO MANY! Our American hosts couldn’t believe how crazy we were for them… but there is nothing even remotely like this in Scotland, it was like being in a fantasy movie or something. I’ll never forget them.
I love them so much! They come out part-way through my Speculative Fiction Writing Workshop (now taking applications! Pat Cadigan returns as special guest author this year!) each year, and it’s such a joy to introduce these little delights to people from parts of the world where they can’t see them.
PS: In Minnesota, we called them “lightning bugs.”
We had them in Norfolk, Virginia when I was a kid. Same time of year as the junebugs, but those are in the daytime.
Ok but imagine being an Irish immigrant coming to America for the first time having never heard of them and just…nope nope nope Don’t Go In Those Fields The Fairies Fucking Followed US I Thought We Would Be Free Of This Nonsense
why. do people get off on writing traumatizing events happening to their ocs
why cant you just say “yeah i enjoy developing my ocs’ backstories” or “its fun coming up with their lore” instead of being freaks who talk about how fuuun it is to abuse your ocs n how you just loooove making em into bloody messes
like its not cute
i dont know how to make this clearer but that comics like this:
are fucking everywhere on tumblr and always have like 50k notes is terrifying. yall get a hobby and stop n*tting over trauma n abuse its weird n youre Not off the hook for being the character creator if youre gonna act like THIS about it
almost 100% the time it’s the creator projecting their own trauma on their ocs and it’s actually painfully obvious that that’s the case…
Actually it’s also just people writing what the hell they want a lot of the time and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Also the comic example here is clearly a style of exaggeration to make something funny out of a relatable experience that’s developed over years of talking about it in a certain way; in most people’s cases, the relatable experience is creating drama and development through anything from tragic back stories to traumatic events.
If you go back a couple years on tumblr, you’d actually find posts discussing why so many people wanted to create sad, dark, or painful stories for their characters, and why they were always put through such horrible things (and why everyone seemed to ready to do it.)
Some people said they did it to explore their own experiences. Some people did it because it was a way to explore those themes they were unfamiliar with in a completely fictional world. I think overwhelmingly, people agreed it gave characters a lot more depth, ability to be empathized with, and attachment. It fosters protective feelings in people to see characters go through bad experiences.
In any case, there was a shift in how OC treatment (and character treatment in fandom as well,) was viewed and talked about. People went from “I’m about to make my fav go through something bad bc I love him and it’ll make him into the character I love” (or something similar, you get my drift,) to funny posts like the ones above, because among creators there was and is an understanding of how we all tend to do that to them, and its making a joke from it because you don’t get noticed by being the nth person to make the same ~relatable post~ again, you do it by taking something relatable and making it new and funny (welcome to tumblr.)
But I guess it’s more edgy to completely ignore the language development that’s pretty consistent with the dramatic escalation EVERYTHING gets spoken about on here (basically the “cultural subtext,”) to call people freaks in order to participate in callout culture and feel superior in some way, so good for you I guess?????
Writer/roleplayer jokes and character development is are problematic now I guess.
somebodys gonna take the “socializing in a friendly manner with the FBI agent monitoring me” too literally and make a whole rant about how it’s actually really horrible that we’re humanizing and undemonize the fbi and it’s creepy big brother schtick and half of the website is gonna feel guilty and embarrassed for laughing at this joke and will avoid posts that even mention the fbi and the other half are gonna send death threats to the op of the original post and they’re gonna get driven off of tumblr saying some shit like “I’ve realized how toxic and unwelcoming this website is I need some time for myself” and then months later somebody’s gonna point out how it was a coping mechanism form of humor because we literally can do nothing about the fbi monitoring us and then everyone will feel stupid no matter what side they took and we’ll all silently agree to never bring it up again until five years from now in one of those “memes from 2018” posts
toasty here! I just accidentally deleted…everything, in an innocent attempt to get rid of one unnecessary sideblog.
it blows my mind that every post I’ve ever made that people ever reblogged will now lead back to a “there’s nothing here!” page…on this blog, but still.
I don’t think there’s any way to get this stuff back. I sent a message to staff but my hopes aren’t high. there’s…a lot of rebuilding to do, and I don’t know if I’ll ever come all the way back from this? but I’m gonna try and remember who all I was following before, and get my old sideblog urls back.
I’ve been thinking of getting an art-only blog for a while now, so maybe I’ll just think of this as a particularly brutal kind of spring cleaning.
feel free to spread this around, if you don’t mind.
honestly, people will call you a sjw for showing even the most basic respect for someones space, identity, and humanity and that is pathetic. like being a good person is seen as ‘giving in’ to some imaginary sjw machine when really it’s just called being a good person.
look I like to dunk on the straights as much as the next person but this picture so clearly embodies sibling culture that I have to assume everyone agreeing with these comments is an only child
