dymphnadreamer-blog

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Reblog this if your inbox is open 24/7 for plotting.

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@chaosdeathdestruction

I honestly believe the whole “adults require less sleep” thing is honest to god probably a myth created by capitalism

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🌸EDITING:

Comprehensive and copy editing for $3 per page. OPEN TO ALL FANFIC, ORIGINAL WORK, AND ACADEMIC WORK.

🌸RESUMES: Once given your information, I will construct a resume for you for $2. If you have a specific job in mind, I will write you a cover letter for $2.

🌸WRITING:

I will write you a poem on any topic for $2 per poem. I will write 500 word ficlets for $5 per fic (fandom list below).

I will write scholarship essays once given the appropriate information for $2 per page!

🌸PAYPAL INFO AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST! DONATIONS WELCOME AND APPRECIATED!  🌸

Fandom list: Sherlock, Supernatural, Lost, Homestuck, Undertale, Yuri on Ice, Kingdom Hearts, Phoenix Wright, Legend of Zelda, Orange is the New Black, Phan, Marvel, Disney, Glee, Black Mirror, Parks and Rec, Queer as Folk, One Punch Man Anime.

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@chaosdeathdestruction

What does my cat think when I kiss his little head? Does he know it’s affection or does he think I’m trying to eat him

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February eBook Sale: #IWWV is only $3.99!

After what felt like the longest January in recorded history, here’s some good news: If We Were Villains eBooks are on sale for $3.99 in February! To learn a little more about the book, click here. To buy a copy, follow this link, select ‘eBook’ in the dropdown menu on the right, and choose the retailer you prefer.

Happy reading!

Xx M

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This moved me to tears. You should not have to keep shouting it, but this is my first time seeing it, and I feel blessed that I did. Fucking thank you @dukeofbookingham

*curtsies* So, I really, REALLY don't want to offend anyone, Duke, but a question has been bothering me for a really long time and I was afraid to ask it because I didn't want to piss off anyone and since you're really eloquent and knowledgeable, I thought I'd ask you. So here it goes: you always say that arts and sciences are equally important, but how can analysing Chaucer or ecopoetics or anything similar compare to biomedicine or engineering in improving human lives? I'm genuinely curious!

*Curtsies* All right. Let me tell you a story: 

When I lived in London, I shared a flat with a guy who was 26 years old, getting his PhD in theoretical physics. Let’s call him Ron. Ron could not for the life of him figure out why I was wasting my time with an MA in Shakespeare studies or why my chosen method of providing for myself was writing fiction. Furthermore, it was utterly beyond him why I should take offense to someone whose field literally has the word “theoretical” in the title ridiculing the practical inefficacy of art. My pointing out that he spent his free time listening to music, watching television, and sketching famous sculptures in his notebook somehow didn’t convince him that art is a necessary part of a healthy human existence. 

Three other things that happened with Ron: 

I came home late one night and he asked where I’d been. When I told him I’d been at a friend’s flat for a Hanukkah celebration, he said, “What’s Hanukkah?” I thought he was joking. He was not.

A few weeks later, I came downstairs holding a book. He asked what I was reading and when I said, “John Keats,” he (and the three other science grad students in the room) did not know who that was. This would be like me not knowing who Thomas Edison is.

One night we got into an argument about the issue of gay marriage, and at one point he actually said, “It doesn’t affect me so I don’t see why I should care about it.”

Now: If Ron had ever read Number the Stars, or heard Ode to a Nightingale, or been to a performance of The Laramie Project, do you think he ever would have asked any of these questions? 

Obviously this is an extreme example. This guy was amazingly ignorant, but he was also the walking embodiment of the questions you’re asking. What does art matter compared with something like science, that saves people’s lives? Here’s the thing: There’s a flaw in the question, because art saves lives, too. Maybe not in the same “Eureka, we’ve cured cancer!” kind of way, but that doesn’t make it any less important. Sometimes the impact of art is relatively small, even invisible to the naked eye. For example: as a young teenager I was (no exaggeration) suicidally unhappy. Learning to write is what kept me (literally and figuratively) off the ledge. But I was one nameless teenager; in the greater scheme of things, who cares? Fair enough. Let’s talk big picture. Let’s talk about George Orwell. George Orwell wrote books, the two most famous of which are Animal Farm and 1984. You probably read at least one of those in high school. Why do these books matter? Because they’re cautionary tales about limiting the power of oppressive governments, and their influence is so pervasive that the term “Big Brother,” which refers to the omniscient government agency which watches its citizens’ every move in 1984, has become common parlance to refer to any abuse of power and invasion of privacy by a governmental body. Another interesting fact, and the reason I chose this example: sales of 1984 fucking skyrocketed in 2017, Donald Trump’s first year in office. Why? Well, people are terrified. People are re-reading that cautionary tale, looking for the warning signs. 

Art, as Shakespeare taught us, “holds a mirror up to nature.” Art is a form of self-examination. Art forces us to confront our own mortality. (Consider Hamlet. Consider Dylan Thomas.) Art forces us to confront inequality. (Consider Oliver Twist. Consider Audre Lorde. Consider A Raisin in the Sun. Consider Greta Gerwig getting snubbed at the Golden Globes.) Art forces us to confront our own power structures. (Consider Fahrenheit 451. Consider “We Shall Overcome.” Consider All the President’s Men. Consider “Cat Person.”) Art reminds us of our own history, and keeps us from repeating the same tragic mistakes. (Consider The Things They Carried. Consider Schindler’s List. Consider Hamilton.) Art forces us to make sense of ourselves. (Consider Fun House. Consider Growing Up Absurd.) Art forces us to stop and ask not just whether we can do something but whether we should. (Consider Brave New World. Consider Cat’s Cradle.) You’re curious about ecopoetics? The whole point is to call attention to human impact on the environment. Some of our scientific advances are poisoning our planet, and the ecopoetics of people like the Beats and the popular musicians of the 20th century led to greater environmental awareness and the first Earth Day in 1970 . Art inspires change–political, social, environmental, you name it. Moreover, art encourages empathy. Without books and movies and music, we would all be stumbling around like Ron, completely ignorant of every other culture, every social, political, or historical experience except our own. Since we have such faith in science: science has proved that art makes us better people. Science has proved that people who read fiction not only improve their own mental health but become proportionally more empathetic. (Really. I wrote an article about this when I was working for a health and wellness magazine in 2012.) If you want a more specific example: science has proved that kids who read Harry Potter growing up are less bigoted. (Here’s an article from Scientific American, so you don’t have to take my word for it.) That is a big fucking deal. Increased empathy can make a life-or-death difference for marginalized people.

But the Defense of Arts and Humanities is about more than empirical data, precisely because you can’t quantify it, unlike a scientific experiment. Art is–in my opinion–literally what makes life worth living. What the fuck is the point of being healthier and living longer and doing all those wonderful things science enables us to do if we don’t have Michelangelo’s David or Rimbaud’s poetry or the Taj Mahal or Cirque de Soleil or fucking Jimi Hendrix playing “All Along the Watchtower” to remind us how fucking amazing it is to be alive and to be human despite all the terrible shit in this world? Art doesn’t just “improve human lives.” Art makes human life bearable.

I hope this answers your question. 

To it I would like to add: Please remember that just because you don’t see the value in something doesn’t mean it is not valuable. Please remember that the importance of science does not negate or diminish the importance of the arts, despite what every Republican politician would like you to believe. And above all, please remember that artists are every bit as serious about what they do as astronomers and mathematicians and doctors, and what they do is every bit as vital to humanity, if in a different way. Belittling their work by questioning its importance, or relegating it to a category of lesser endeavors because it isn’t going to cure a disease, or even just making jokes about how poor they’re going to be when they graduate is insensitive, ignorant, humiliating, and, yes,  offensive. And believe me: they’ve heard it before. They don’t need to hear it again. We know exactly how frivolous and childish and idealistic and unimportant everyone thinks we are. Working in the arts is a constant battle against the prevailing idea that what you do is useless. But it’s bad enough that the government is doing its best to sacrifice all arts and humanities on the altar of STEM–we don’t need to be reminded on a regular basis that ordinary people think our work is a waste of time and money, too. 

Artists are exhausted. They’re sick and tired of being made to justify their work and prove the validity of what they do. Nobody else in the world is made to do that the way artists are. That’s why these questions upset them. That’s why it exasperates me. I have to answer some version of this question every goddamn day, and I am so, so tired. But I’ve taken the effort to answer it here, again, in the hopes that maybe a couple fewer people will ask it in the future. But even if you’re not convinced by everything I’ve just said, please try to find some of that empathy, and just keep it to yourself. 

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hey are you actually lgbtq @ all or just out here

I’m Bi/Pan, in a committed relationship, and proud as hell!

Why do I say Bi/Pan instead of one of those? More info in my response to an earlier reader question.

Why do I bring up my relationship status? Because people are confused about bi/pan folks and relationships!

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Anyway if you’re gonna make fun of fat men for wearing speedoes/swim suits/ect but defend fat women who are being made fun of for wearing swim suits/bikinis you don’t actually care about fat people lmao.

You either make fun of all of it or defend all of it. You can’t pick and choose.

Fat boys/men deserve the same fucking respect as fat girls/women.

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@chaosdeathdestruction

For more posts like these, go to @mypsychology​

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About a week ago I posted this.

I’ve been getting horrible messages like this in my ask for months, including:

and my personal favorite

After getting the message saying “Just go kill yourself” I was completely done dealing with this person’s horrible messages and replied with just an “Okay.” and logged off tumblr.

About a week later I logged back on with 17 messages in my ask, most of them from the anon. I scrolled down and at first when I logged off, the anon messaged me things like

I scrolled up more and all of a sudden they started sending me more and more messages like

This was extremely surprising to me. I thought “After all those horrible messages you sent to me for MONTHS about hating me and wanting me dead, you say ‘sorry’ and that you ‘cant be responsible for someone’s suicide’?”

But I guess the lesson goes like this:

DONT TELL ANYONE TO KILL THEMSELVES UNLESS YOU ARE PREPARED FOR WHAT MIGHT ACTUALLY HAPPEN

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Please make this go viral.

It is so important I don’t even care if you delete what I write here, just help it be seen. 

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Yo I set up an [Associates] page for other writer peeps. If you want to be on it and you’re not, send me a message with your preferred name and your writeblr url and I’ll add you!

Also this is a good time to remind people that I’ve made a [Facebook Page] for all my author-ly stuff so it’d be cool if you would check it out!

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if you get a notification from @/pussyaids, DO NOT click or tap on it. they are @’ing people in extreme gore and sexually-explicit posts. report them to @staff via this link and block them.

you can reblog this – in fact, i encourage it.

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Sheer, beautiful brilliance OP. You deserve an award for this.

If Harry had gotten a less conventional, but more loving adoptive family...

Dear Minerva,

Thank you so much for your kind letter of the 17th. It is always a pleasure to hear from you. I do appreciate your waiving the rules about familiars to allow Wednesday to bring little Homer - she dotes on that spider, and I don’t think she could consider Hogwarts home without his company.

We were delighted but completely unsurprised by the children’s Sorting. Of course Wednesday is a Ravenclaw - she has always had a brilliant mind, and it is rather traditional for the women in our family. Slytherin might have been a possibility, with her cleverness and ambition, but sadly (and quietly, between friends) I must admit the wrong sort have rather taken over that House at the moment. Death Eaters are so vulgar. Gomez, naturally, is over the moon about our little Harry being a fellow Gryffindor - the world does need more dashing, brave, and reckless men. They make life so interesting for the rest of us, don’t you agree? And I am certain he will be safe under your care, after his rather difficult start in life, poor child. That aunt and uncle of his are just too terribly common to protect him adequately - I am grateful Albus saw sense and left him with us rather than her.

I appreciate your bringing to my attention the small difficulty between Harry and Draco - I shall have a word with Narcissa. (Lucius is still being terribly silly about that little peacock incident, and refuses to speak to Gomez at all. Men can be so ridiculously proud. And they really did look so much better in black.) Really, though, Harry was only defending his friend. I probably should warn you that Wednesday writes that she is teaching young Longbottom a few of her more subtle defenses - I sincerely doubt Draco will trouble him in future if he uses those. I assure you, none of them cause permanent damage, only temporary discomfort, and she is well aware that they are only for self-defense, not mere childish aggression. Addamses do not start fights, but we do finish them, and Wednesday has always looked out for her brothers.

At least that little incident allowed you to see Harry’s flying skills in time to recruit him for the Quidditch team. I think he shall be an excellent Seeker - he was always the best at bat-spotting on summer evenings, and then there was the time he “borrowed” Gomez’s broom to rescue Pugsley’s pet octopus Aristotle, who had developed an unaccountable taste for tree-climbing, but had neglected to learn how to climb down. It was a successful rescue, even though he was mildly hampered on his descent by Aristotle clinging to his face in terror.

Please send my apologies to Severus for that unfortunate incident in Potions class. I should have warned him that Wednesday was experimenting with, shall we say, some variant recipes. I am quite certain, however, that Miss Parkinson’s hair will grow back normally, and that the snakes are only a temporary embellishment.

My best regards, and do drop by for tea if you ever happen to be in the neighborhood. Thing has perfected your favorite shortbread recipe - I do believe he has a little crush on you. Or perhaps it is merely that you are the only visitor we have had, outside of family, who is sensible enough to shake hands with him without flinching.

Yours truly,

Morticia Addams

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