When I was in high school we did an english unit on Octavia Butler and the teacher told us hey btw. You should call her "Butler" in your essays. Sometimes students call female writers by their first names unconsciously, but that's not acceptable. If you wouldnt call them William or Ernest you shouldn't call her Octavia.

And I was like cool whatever I was gonna call her Butler anyways. But that moment has stuck with me for my whole life because once you start seeing ppl calling women by their first names where men would be called by their last names you literally never stop seeing it.

you know what. I think I should be allowed to temporarily turn into a seal and go swimming around in the ocean for a while. just submit a little note to work that says "sorry, I need to take some sick time, I am becoming a seal" and leave for a week

the point of reading a book is to forget you want to die

doing things at the right age is literally a made up concept. you can start/pursue anything at any age. btw.

remember remember

#the beauty of tumblr is that any new show i start i'm able to say oh that's my friend. from gif.

Pink Panther: The Pink Phink Director: Friz Freleng Studio: DePatie–Freleng | USA, 1964

There's a lot of stuff that counts as dystopian about modern society, but one of the smaller yet insidious things I've noticed recently is the rise of companies whose entire marketing strategy is to convince you you're a burden to your friends and families.

I'm talking about that one dog watching/walking service that has a whole commercial implying that your family members secretly hate you for asking them to watch your dog to the point it counts as a modern social faux pas.

And there's this moving service commercial that I think someone else referenced in a big tweet that says something along the line of "Real adults don't ask their friends to help them move."

Like fuck that, man. You're supposed to want to watch your friends' pets, and you're supposed to want to help your friends move, and you're supposed to cook for people when they're sick, and you're supposed to show up to check on friends you haven't heard from in awhile, and you're supposed to remember your friend needs a large frying pan when you find one cheap at the thrift store and bring it to them.

One of the reasons the younger generations are so miserable and lonely is because the rise of technology and the concurrent pushing of this rhetoric that all effort is a major inconvenience, and asking someone to put in effort for you therefore makes you an inconvenience has conditioned them not to seek community.

And because they've never experienced it, they don't know that's what's missing. It's a vicious cycle because when you're depressed from lack of community, finding the energy to put in effort for other people is a lot harder than getting quick dopamine hits from scrolling on social media or watching Netflix. Then you encounter the further issue that our media glorifies romantic love to the exclusion of all else, so most of the young people I know who are lonely jump to "Well I just need a girlfriend/boyfriend/partner," and that sets up rough relationships because one person is expected to fill the void of a dozen or more friends and neighbors.

So please believe me: If you're lonely, try volunteering somewhere in the community. Try going to events around your interests. Try talking to local shop owners. Bake something and surprise a friend with it. Search for nearby clubs or intramural sports teams. There are companies literally capitalizing on subtlely encouraging you NOT to do these things. We've reached the point where helping your friend move is an anticapitalist act.

Always remember that most modern advertising is manipulating you to create a need they can sell you a solution to. They've got increasingly abusive about it. If you see an ad and it hits the same red flags as an abuser trying to isolate someone to get power over them, that company is being abusive and you need to get far away from them. The opposite is probably true.

Humans became the dominant species on earth because we cooperate and fill each other's needs even when it doesn't immediately and directly benefit us. Anyone cynically trying to convince you otherwise wants to disadvantage you to make you helpless and gain power over you. Asking for help helps others realize they can ask for help.

How many of these have you read?

Wasilla, Alaska

patrickthunalaskaphotos

The final, brilliant word on passive voice.

“She was killed [by zombies.]” <— passive

“Zombies killed [by zombies] her.” <— active

This is legit one of the best ways to identify passive voice.

The passive voice has been successfully identified.

(by zombies)

whats a passive voice

passive voice is when you can’t tell who’s done the action in a sentence! so, to use the example from a few reblogs up, “she was killed” doesn’t tell us WHO killed her, so it’s passive voice (adding the “by zombies” after the verb shows this)—in an active voice sentence, like the second example, you can’t add the “by zombies” and still have it make sense, since the information about who’s killed her is already in the sentence. active voice is generally a stronger choice to use in writing, since it makes your sentences clearer and more specific.

writers should write whatever they want, then take 50% or more of their male characters and make them female by doing nothing except change pronouns/name. "but he's a dad!" well now she's a mom, and yeah she sucks at it. she's a deadbeat alcoholic womanizing space bounty hunter, and she can't remember her kids birthdays cause she hasn't been back to Earth 2 in 25 years when they were 2 years & five month olds. that rules. change that character from Mark to Mara right now.

what x files episode should i watch?

i just spent 2 hours of my life making this flowchart wtf

click to enlarge

notes: not every episode is on here and i didn’t rec much past season 7

edit: this was updated to add a few eps i forgot about!!