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Beyond Belief with Jonathan Frakes except it's tumblr posts

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Tonight I poured one out for Toriyama sensei

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There was a new LGBT+ acronym, and it was twig etc. (it had to be in lowercase for some reason). It stood for trans, Welsh, intersex, and gay. Everyone else was etc. It was very controversial.

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I must sleep. Sleep is the mind-healer. Sleep is the big-life that brings total ability to fucking do anything. I will face my bed. I will permit the blankie to pass over me and snores to pass through me. And when sleep has gone past I will turn the outer eye to greet the new morning. When the sleep has gone there will be everything. Energy and will to live will remain.

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Live every day as if it's leap day, and every leap day as if it's your last.

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Don't forget to cry so people give you candy today! Or any day!

Holiday Engineering: Leap Dave Williams

S6E9 of 30 Rock, "Leap Day," provides us with a fascinating and valuable artifact from a holiday-engineering perspective: an invented, made-from-scratch festival that is designed to feel like a real and successful festival that already has legs.

...this is rare. The people who invent new holidays are usually in the vanguard of new social/cultural/ideological movements, and they're usually doing so with an eye towards their immediate circumstances and their immediate goals; they want to Make a Statement about their favorite principles, they want to appeal to the idiosyncrasies of their most devoted fellow-travelers, often they want to promote group cohesion and insularity, etc. You don't often get people creating stuff from whole cloth while asking, "how would this work if it were already fully embedded in society and treated like a normal holiday?"

For that you have to turn to fiction. And most fictional holidays, I've found, are not very well-thought-out. But 30 Rock's weird bizarro-world version of Leap Day is...surprisingly impressive, and would-be holiday engineers can learn something from it. It's pretty stripped-down and basic, as you'd expect from a festival made up for one 30-minute episode of television that's mostly about something else. But there's some real there there. I think you could actually observe the holiday-as-written, without adding content, and people would get something out of it. Certainly, with a little embellishment, you could get something good.

(We're going to discount the part where there's, allegedly, a cheesy holiday movie where Jim Carrey learns the true meaning of Leap Day. That kind of thing is great if you can actually swing it, but you can't, so it doesn't help.)

Theme. This is honestly the holiday's biggest weakness, but even so, it's better than you might expect. The message is: "Leap Day is for taking a leap! Do something bold, something new, something unexpected!" Which is punchy and resonant. The problem, of course, is that it's not observable in a ritual context. You can't be in the proper Leap Day spirit without thinking outside the box, and holidays are all about providing a box in which you can stay for a little while. To do the Leap Day thing, you have to make reference to the particular contours of your own individual life, which is the opposite of how festivals work. But everyone can probably think of some way in which "making a leap" would be meaningful for him, so OK.

The flip side is that, because Leap Day is such a necessarily-individualist holiday in concept, it makes sense for the observances to be so minimalist. There's no Leap Day Festive Family Meal, and thus no traditions surrounding such a thing, but...that makes sense, right? You're not supposed to spend Leap Day going home to eat with your family, you're supposed to do something crazy.

Timing. Also kind of unfortunate. Once-every-four-years is not enough observance to build up resonance and holiday feeling. You're probably going to experience only four Leap Days over the course of your childhood and adolescence, when you're building your deep-seated associations, and each time the memories of the last one are going to be very fuzzy. Ah, well, it's baked into the core concept, nothing to be done.

Mythology. Every four years, Leap Day William emerges from the Marianas Trench to exchange candy for children's tears. And you know what? That's solid. It's a very simple story, but it's memorable, and you can riff on it.

Activities. You pretend to cry so that people will give you candy. Again, simple but solid. Easy-to-perform, but very distinctive. For a holiday that mostly can't be ritualized by its very nature, it's probably good to have a two-second ritual easy-peasy ritual to remind you that 'Tis the Season.

Symbols. You're supposed to wear blue and yellow. Garish, but that's the holidays for you. It's as distinctive a color palette as Christmas's. And if you don't wear blue and yellow, people get to pull your hair (or kick you in the shins) (or something). I have a strong personal dislike for the St. Patrick's Day-esque "enforcement of sartorial holiday norms via cheeky physical violence" thing, and I'd encourage aspiring holiday engineers not to include that kind of content on moral grounds, but -- from an amoral design perspective, it's great, it uses base human instincts to turn people into propagators of Proper Holiday Spirit.

Traditional food (sweets). Everyone loves candy. If want to add some cheap zing to your holiday, find a way to incorporate giving people candy. It's better to have a distinctive and memorable holiday food, but that's difficult and may not be appropriate. Candy is super easy and there's almost always an excuse for it.

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You better be wearing yellow and blue for leap day!

the Leap Day episode of 30 Rock is one of my absolute favorite things

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the selective breeding of music to get shorter and shorter for tik tok has resulted in devastating negative long term health effects on the songs

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what they dont tell you about adulthood is that it’s startlingly easy to go long periods of time without having any fun at all not even a little bit. btw this causes ur brain to try to kill you with knives and hammers.

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yo yo wait that reminds me of something really funny i saw once, hold on--(you watch me open my phone browser and manually and correctly type the entire url of a specific tumblr post)

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I woke up at 6am and wrote an obituary for the two old guys in the muppets

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when she says she doesn’t send nudes

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the stardew valley modding community is having a little war over grandpa's bed