#iona adds needlessly onto other people's posts

[princessithaca]

never got into methods of rationality bc why would you want wizard fanfic not about being a Cool Wizard but i fully read datyod when i was a kid and did not at all think about how ridiculous or grimdark it was because i was a Literal Child who'd grown up reading like. original grimms tales and the wind singer and then never thought about it again until late 2020 when i was browsing reddit and stumbled across an article about it and lost 20 minutes of my life to an increasingly hysterical fanlore wormhole

anyway have this meme i sent my sister about it:

like i wasn't active on fannish social media when i read it bc i was a preteen so i just completely and utterly missed the entire cult saga and had put it out of my mind and i just. literally what in the god damned hell

If I had a nickel for every big name Harry Potter fanfic writer who started their own cult, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice.

EDIT: These two are Less Wrong/Eliezer Yudkowsky of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality fame and the other one was Thanfiction of Dumbledore’s Army and the Year of Darkness fame.

[princessithaca]

amateur, from the latin amator, meaning 'lover'. a person who does something just for the love of it. when did that become an insult?

go write bad poetry. i can't wait to read it.

write bad poetry. 

wrap your mouth into a cliche. write about icarus, write about roses. write about the flowers in your ribs and the stain of your fingertips and the skin of your knees. write about cigarettes and getting high and kissing the wrong person. and space; write about space over and over in sixty iterations of it, write about star-blood and star-crossed and star-glowing, write about universes and galaxies and gladiators in constellations. write about the space between two people in a small room, write about the space that is too small no matter how big it is, write about the space that is too big no matter how small it is. write yourself a star and eat it, tinfoil-tasting, on the floor of your kitchen, while you regret missing your mother’s cooking. but write it.

write ugly. use too many undercase letters because you’re pretentious. USE ONLY CAPITAL LETTERS BECAUSE YOU’VE GOT A SCREAM TRAPPED UNDER YOUR FINGERNAILS. ,, cut & paste grammar (? who gives a shit ?) ,, r3inv3nt so much u come back 2 l33t speak, dial it down a bit. write in the language of flaubert, then dickens, then the language your father used before he learned english. then write the language of talking to your dog, then write the language of high school essays on books you never finished. utilize the word utilize where it don’t belong. fall in and out of love with contractions. accidentally become bukowski for a hot sec, grow out of it. 

write things you wish you hadn’t. write stuff so bad you can’t help groaning. write things that end in “a;sljflk jfg h” because they petered out while you were typing. write things that feel childish and use so much rhyme it throws you out of it. write things that feel grown-up and unfamiliar, too formal to function, up-their-own-asses. write things too enigmatic; forget what you wrote them about, but tell yourself it’s for the best. write things too obvious. go through a micro-poetry spell, go through a prose-poetry spell, fish the bottom of the box for x-ray goggles and write about how the cereal felt. write about your cat and the rug and un-deep fake-deep terrible stuff.

write things you really wish you hadn’t. stuff that hurts to read and hurts to look at later, stuff that makes your skin uncomfy and your body crawl. write stuff that looks better at the back of your closet. but stuff you can’t get rid of, really, not ever. stuff that, afterwards, makes you feel heavier. stuff that somehow, impossibly, kinda makes you lighter.

write about stuff you don’t really understand, write about social problems you barely experience, write about slam poetry. write about power outlets, write in the style of internet poets, write frost-length sonnets on how pink her lips are. 

write bad. write worse. write bottom-of-the-barrel, and then keep scraping it. keep digging in it. god, how many people are too scared of being bad that they just. never get around to it. that they never even start doing it. what if all they have to say is silly shit about lost love or greek myths or a good kiss. what if they’re bad at it.

be bad at it. do you know how fucking rebellious and wonderful that truly, i mean truly is? and that’s poetry, man. the act of being so vulnerable, you’re willing to completely suck at it. big ideas in small boxes. it takes a long time before you get the packaging to fit. 

go write bad poetry. i can’t wait to read it.

[princessithaca]

yeah that's. accurate.

aight this made twitter people angry so i’ll say it here too

Yahoo answers shutting down on a month’s notice is a good reason to remember why donation-run sites like AO3 are so invaluable to fandom.

Companies will delete decades of work with zero warning the minute it stops making them money. protect non-profits and donate when u can.

[princessithaca]

how dare you insult jessica kellgren-fozard like this

hey please rb and tag what you think is the unsexiest job a romantic prospect can have. for me it's lesbian youtuber

[princessithaca]

and the angel said unto them "do not be afraid. for i have a fuckin knarly light show for you all my dudes"

100 drones giving a light show!

© 2019 Firefly Drone Shows, LLC

[princessithaca]

actually on reflection after having read some truly hilarious misinterpretations in the tags i have come to the conclusion that while we may not have social media stories, we do have lore like absolutely no other website in existence and you know what sometimes im not sure that the rabies fetishist deepfake is worth the lack of 24hr bullshit

I can’t believe it falls to tumblr to be the last bastion of humanity that doesn’t have stories.

[princessithaca]

can i just add that ceilidh is not. ceilidh is not a name. it's a dance party. and aisling is, like, not difficult for an anglophone to cope with compared to so many gaelige/gadhlíg names come on.

i've genuinely never gotten this absolute panic about names/words from another language family etc.

like of course there are sounds in other languages that are hard to imitate at first, of course. it took me a couple tries to get the d/t, k/g thing in korean, and im aware it takes my english friends some considerable effort to deal with the 'ch' in 'loch' or the sort of recessed 'u' found in gadhlíg, but like.

you don't know how to pronounce something? well, if you see it in writing you can google it prior to meeting them as there's almost certainly a "how to pronounce x" clip on yt, and if not, the ipa is marvelously helpful.

this also works if they tell you in person but you don't really get it (which is fine! it happens! just go sort it yourself don't mock or badger them about it)

just. yeah. don't treat other people's languages like curios??? i see it happen all the time, pretty much universally among anglophones, nd it's just. tremendously entitled and rude.

also. "spell it however you want, it's your name" was literally the modus operandi in english for hundreds of years standardised spelling is a modern invention so congratulations you are both culturally insensitive and factually ill-informed twitter user @ kyle plant emoji

The tea is that Irish names aren't that bizarre and Irish spelling isn't particularly wild in the grand scheme of languages, anglophones are just used to anglicising names and y'all think Irish is some fiddly dee dee funny fairy language and not like...an actual living language under threat

[princessithaca]

personally i hate brutalism and think we should absolutely but a shit million tudor style houses back on that bridge but that's maybe just me. also just to clear things up, the "london bridge is falling down" song is. not about this relocation, like, at all. in case anyone was still confused.

literally traumatizing to learn that the london bridge is in fucking arizona

[princessithaca]

additional concept that is hilarious to me: in some nebulous everything-is-fine-ahahaha-dreamer-trilogy-who? world, the next time adam sees gansey, this lived experience renders him able to suddenly see through gansey's bullshit in a way he previously couldn't and he's like. "oh my god you are falling apart at the seams what the fuck"

the fact that adam decided to be gansey at college for Gansey The Only True Shining Worthwhile Light In This World reasons & in the process ALSO became someone who masks his true feelings and pretends to have his shit together while going to pieces and refuses to reach out for mutual support and feels like a lonely neurotic mess all the time and needs magic/wonder to alleviate the misery...... good god. method acting gone Wrong. rip adam and this giant hole u dug urself

[princessithaca]

no the tea comment is fine the final straw was actually london boy

I wonder if British swifties have decided to boycott Taylor after they heard her sing about her "day-old tea"

please ahsdjfgsahjkf

[princessithaca]

see this is something about which i was always sort of aware, but have noticed a lot more since moving away from home for university.

now i don't go to school in a big city exactly, but it's definitely a more urban area than i'm used to. i come from a sort of semi-rurual overgrown village. we're hardly the sticks, i've always thought - there's a big town nearby with a decent bus link to it and my high school was 40 minutes away at worst. pretty fine. but.

man. when i went to uni i was kind of. 'whaaaat' about a lot of things my city dweller flatmates took for granted. i had a little "wtf" moment when i realised i could get uber eats to my door. there were restaurants within walking distance that weren't like. the local pub. there were clothes shops! bookstores! taco places! within walking distance! 20 minutes on foot! the local public library was open every day! mad.

but lots of my classmates are from cities, from london, even, and man i am quickly learning that that is a different world. like i don't mean to disparage them at all in any way, but it definitely did knock my brain a bit sideways that the very luxuries i was sitting here grinning about were either a given for them, or even a downgrade. like. man it's a 20 minute walk to the theatre!!! that's nuts! everything you need you can walk to. it's gonna take u like a half hour tops. can't wrap my brain around it.

i've also kinda been thinking about this in terms of covid, and lockdowns and whatever else. because in tier 4, you aren't supposed to leave your local authority. and that's all well and good if you live in the city, but it's much more of a problem when everything you need really isn't on your doorstep the way it is in an urban area.

idk. i'm not sure if there's really an extra point here, just musing, but i have to agree with op. access to humanity is a privilege, truly, and one that so many people don't realise they even have

the Most consistent culture shock i have living in a city is what people consider a long drive.  to me, anything within 30 minutes is Unbelievably And Gloriously Close, and i’ll drive up to 90 minutes for an appointment or event without hesitation.  (i’ll drive a hell of a lot longer than that if it’s a Really Good Opportunity.)  the doctor’s office just called about my rheumatology referral to ask whether i wanted to go somewhere close to me or closer to the office, which is 20 minutes away.  and i was like ……..those are….. the same…. place…? we are in the same place? what do u mean close to me or close to u….. it’s all within 30 minutes of me

(note: i know that if i was taking public transit, 30 minutes would become 2.5 hours at Best. lots of people around here take public transit. it makes sense for distance to be the office’s first priority.)

healthcare professionals around here WINCE when i say i’ve driven 20-30 minutes for an appointment & are like “WHY” & every time i’m like.  no no no i promise this is not a hardship for me.  doesn’t even ping my radar as an inconvenience.  literally i am GLAD to have driven 20 minutes, that is a relaxed stroll around the block as far as i’m concerned.  i cannot express to you how much of a rural hick i am

anyway.  i opened google maps out of curiosity and counted 62 rheumatology practices within 10 miles of me before i got bored of counting.  having trouble fathoming it.  i used to drive over an hour to see my psychiatrist because that is how far i had to go to find a woman who would treat bipolar disorder and ADHD together.

cities are weird man.  the access to humanity is a privilege i don’t think i’ll ever stop being shocked by

[princessithaca]

same. i weigh literally nothing even now, and one of the rugby lads once sent me careering off into the stage like i was a fuckin frisbee during orcadian strip the willow 🤦‍♀️ i think they had a running bet on how far they could throw the girls if im honest lmao

Scots that follow me, know what I miss?

Country dancing in high school. Weeks of chaos.