Believe In Me

Just found out there's a group on inaturalist dedicated to showcasing the silliest observations

A few other good ones

Yes very regal

do you ever start writing a comment on the internet and then think “oh what the fuck am i going on about” and delete it

I also enjoy writing an entire paragraph, thinking "you know, I don't actually need to be involved in this conversation," and deleting it

clicking a pen over and over again is actually fun as fuck its a shame it makes everyone in a 30 foot radius want to kill me with a rock

when people are like “he’s not even attractive you could find a guy that looks like him at any gas station” i’m like….. well you see there’s beauty everywhere actually

You can also find a sunset at a gas station

time to break out my favorite photo I ever took

yeah i drive the truck that isekais all those lonely 20yo NEETs and bored salarymen. it’s a really hard job. they keep sending me to workplace counselling after each hit. “it’s normal to feel guilt at ending someone’s life,” they say. how do i tell them that’s not what makes me feel guilty? “but it’s okay. he’ll live a better life in another world.” yeah, with 100 girls who could have lived normal lives but got drafted into being in these boring dudes’ harems. how many women’s lives have i ruined. and they don’t even know. they don’t even know

there's a very funny post going around about someone who put together a bluey display for their nephew's birthday, and when he saw the 'bluey' cutout, he revealed to them, in pretty good humor, that the cutout was not in fact bluey, but her father, heeler.

and i can't help but think this never would have happened if bluey had a little pink bow and three upper eyelashes to denote her femininity. more to come on the stunning lack of gender markers in children's media and how it's fucking adults up but the kids are doing just fine

little pink bow erasure is killing our elderly

in their first foray into children's entertainment, the creators of hit show, black-ish, announce a new project slated for 2030

"save me, substance abuse!" i cry. before you can moralize to me about the dangers of addiction, a noble and powerful steed gallops into the room - my horse whom i have named "substance abuse". you learn an important lesson about making assumptions. i snort a line off its back

this reminds me of me and my friend’s horse named Drugs

when i was in middle school me and my friends had a small yellow horse eraser we fondly named “drugs”. this lead to a lot of middle school tomfoolery around his name and saying shit like “Ma’am, so and so took drugs from me” and other dumb shit like that.

eventually, our english teacher, Mr. R, caught onto the joke. instead of writing us up or sending us to the principal though, he played along, making similar jokes like “(name), stop taking drugs.” “hey. you three. you need to share drugs if he’s going to be at the table.” “no drugs today, guys?” so on and so forth.

by the end of the school year it had become a very fond joke between us and this english teacher, so we decided since we were moving onto our freshman year, we decided to give our eng teacher this little yellow horse eraser.

so we go find our english teacher, Mr. R, who was setting up cornhole with our principal and other “big important people” for our 8th grade graduation party, and we hand him the little eraser.

to which he yells as loudly (and happily) as he can: “YOURE GIVING ME DRUGS?!!”

i actually went back to visit him before i left for college, and to this day he still has Drugs on his desk, and regularly tells his new students about me and my friends. ty op for reminding me about Drugs the Horse

the appalachian murder ballad <3 one of the most interesting elements of americana and american folk, imo!

my wife recently gave me A Look when i had one playing in the car and she was like, "why do all of these old folk songs talk about killing people lmao" and i realized i wanted to Talk About It at length.

nerd shit under the cut, and it's long. y'all been warned

As a fellow lover of folk in general, and murder ballads specifically, I would love to offer some other recommendations for woman-friendly murder ballads. Most of these are very modern, but they are in the spirit of the ballads I grew up loving.

The River Knows-Molly Tuttle (A woman who knows she's in a murder ballad turns things around)

Caleb Meyer- Gillian Welch (A woman gets assaulted and kills the man who attacked her)

Old Time Angels- Po Ramblin Boys (The women killed in murder ballads get vengeance)

Griesly Bride- McKain Lakey (A man who thought he'd married a sweet young girl has an unexpected wedding night)

And a selection of more classic ones (plus one modern) that are less happy for their female characters, but no less beautiful. I am sticking to female singers here, because OP is right that their versions usually hit better.

Well Below the Valley- Saya Novinger (This one is dark. Incest, child murder, and guilt abound)

Darlin Corey- Meredith Moon (The life and death of a moonshiner named Corey)

The Highwayman- Loreena McKennitt (A woman and her outlaw lover are killed by British soldiers)

The Cruel Brother- Maeve Mackinnon (A woman is murdered by her slighted brother on her wedding day)

Banks of the Ohio- Dolly Parton (A man recounts how he murdered his lover)

my niche interest! hello, I also have a lot to say about ballads!

Hm I'd like to suggest that folks not take these trends as hard rules, indicating omnidirectionality. I tend to think of ballads as open ammunition being tossed back and forth in the gender wars of oral tradition, flipping back and forth between viewpoints as different singers find ways to make them say different things.

Ballads were hardly a misogynist monolith-they were written by a range of individuals over a wide range of years, and many started out (far as we can tell) carrying women's voices, or have older variants that told more complete and often more empowering versions of their tales that may contain acts of violence against women but that could not originally be condensed to just that feature. Not as a rule by any means, but they're definitely a sizeable number of songs.

Some start out more feminist and lost their teeth over time, and some start out misogynist and gained more feminist frames. It'd be interesting to graph them all out over a timeline and see what trends emerge but also very difficult given the spiderwebbing of variants dating from different periods and going in different directions and the subjectivity of what counts as feminist or the reverse.

Anyhow here are some examples of songs that, far as I can tell, started out fairly feminist long before the 1940s:

Lady Isabel and the Elf Night: dates at least to the 17th c. Very similar to Pretty Polly and Omie Wise (okay also many others) plot wise but when Lady Isobel's courting lover reveals all the other women he's killed before, she kills him instead. Also there's often a parrot.

Fair Annie, an adaptation of Marie de France's late 12th c lai Le Fresne more. Where Annie, the mother of seven of her partner's children, is told to step aside, put out the welcome mat, and feign maidenhood so that he can marry someone new and wealthy. Upon the new bride's arrival she asks who Annie is and why she's crying, then reveals "Oh, we're sisters! Which means you can totally have my dowry and I'm not marrying that pos, you are, don't worry, I'm going the hell home." (emphasis mine but that's basically it)

Broughty Wa's, a Scottish song about outswimming your kidnapper while he sinks like a stone in your wake, known only from Amelia and Jane Harris, sisters who contributed to Child heavily and learned their repertoire from their mother who in turn learned them from "an aged nurse". more

Lady of Loch Royan: most versions of Lord Gregory, as it's known more often today, are the sad tale of a new mother knocking on her lover's door in the rain asking to be let in, only to be turned away by his mother who tells her to jump in the sea, which she does and he wakes up and runs after her, but too late. The two very similar likely oldest versions are an Appalachian variant recorded by Jean Ritchie and the version aggregated by Sir Walter Scott in 1802, unlikely to have been contaminated by knowledge of each other, indicate, "we have here a truly remarkable instance of a unique version of a ballad appearing in two widely separated places 150 years apart" (source), which should serve to underline how often the Appalachian versions might well be the closer-to-original surviving versions of these songs rather than remaining English and Scottish ones, and how difficult they are to date.

Anyhow most of the modern versions of this I hear are highly truncated, just sad Annie crying sweet memories outside of Lord Gregory's door then going off to drown, but the Sir Walter Scott version has her building a ship, meeting with robbers, breaking fairy charms, and being mistaken in her rain-soaked rage for a witch, warlock, or mermaid. I mean she still dies right soggily in despair (or in given how mad she seems in this version, possibly spite), but that's something, surely. more

And not a child ballad but I want to note that the Pretty Polly linked above (there are a bunch of songs by that name, including Lady Isobel, confusingly) is descended from a longer murder ballad called The Cruel Ship's Carpenter/ The Gosport Tragedy, which in it's fuller form most often ends with Polly's ghost appearing and tearing her killer into three pieces.

Ballads <3

*Also might I ask if it's a typo on Twa Sisters going back to the 10th c rather than the 17th I've heard more often, or if I might learn more about that early source? I'm very curious (maybe the related folktale type goes back that far or farther?) Off the top of my head I think Judas is the earliest Child ballad in the 13th c so if there's an earlier one I'd love to know.

fun thing about herding and/or generally neurotic breeds: they are really good at following rules you have instituted, but they will also make their own Dog Rules they will follow stringently whether or not you like it

despite never being reprimanded for getting sick if my dog throws up she will ‘tattle’ on herself and run over to me, show me the throw up, then hide and start shaking uncontrollably. nobody taught her to do this. she has decided that throwing up is a punishable offense until the end of time

my dog has decided that it’s solely on her shoulders to ensure there is peace in my house…if the cats fight she stands between them to ‘break it up’ and/or herds them away, if my rats have an argument she goes to the cage door and barks until they stop. not sure why she has decided she must carry the weight of the world but she has

oh okay

wholesome thread (src)

"There are many types of people who like size difference."

idk why people are offended when kids are like 'im aroace.' yeah, they MIGHT grow out of it. i did! i used to identify as aroace and now i dont and like SO? i was comfy and happy identifyin as aroace. i wasnt hurting anyone. i am comfy and happy now, it didnt like HARM me. and some might NOT grow out of it, and theyll find a label that fits them very young and keep it as they grow older! and be super comfy and happy! like why do you give a shit about the possibility that something COULD be a phase. its not hurting anyone either way! its just making people comfy and happy!

this also goes for being transgender btw

I just found the funniest font ever

Like. What is this. Why is this. Who is the target audience of this?

The font is called "Redacted Script," it's available for free here, and I just ran to download it because I am, in fact, the target audience for this

The company budsies, which specializes in making custom stuffed animals and making duplicates of old or lost plushies, is currently offering to recreate the beloved stuffed animal of any kid who lost theirs in the LA wildfire, free of charge.

Their instagram post said to share this, so please spread this around so that families who've lost everything can receive just a little bit more hope in their lives 🥺

this could actually really help the morale of the people over there. People often underestimate how much of the damage caused by fires is emotional (as opposed to purely financial). Comforting blankets, photos, books, stuffed animals, all the familiar things children and even parents derive a sense of security and comfort from ripped away from them for no good reason. this may not be much, but getting a kid a little stuffed animal to hug while his parents try to find a place to live... the emotional benefit is enormous. And if they aren't able to find a place to live, this might be all they have for a long time.

Posters for National Theater of Korea's production of Macbeth, designed by Yuni Yoshida and photographed by Noh Juhan. [1][2]

I can't believe people have been performing macbeth for 401 years and we still haven't run out of sick poster ideas