i kinda play a character on here but also the character is just me so it cancels out

fox with the northern lights in Finland. 2026.

“In Finnish folklore, the northern lights are created when a mythical fox races across the Arctic tundra, its tail sweeping snow into the sky and setting it ablaze. Those glowing sparks, the story goes, become auroras — a legend reflected in the Finnish word revontulet, which literally translates to ‘fox fires.’”

Photo: Dennis Lehtonen

they won't tell you this in therapy but sometimes the best way to stop catastrophizing/anxiety is to interrupt your spiraling with "girl what the hell are you talking about"

It's not a cure but you have no idea how many times this image has helped me with my OCD

a lot of you really need to internalize that acting avoidant isn't cute at all and that it will cost you experiences and life outcomes if you don't change course

“BACK WHEN TIME DIDN’T MATTER” — AN OIL PAINTING BY RIONA

going to start phrasing my posts like people on linkedin

I drank water today.

Not for the taste, but for longevity.

Here's what drinking water taught me about success...

(no beers in) I lack a lot of the traits people typically define as human and on occasion it haunts me

2025 went by in the blink of an eye but at the same time if you mention something that happened in january it feels like a lifetime ago

Happy aniversary you dumb fucks @staff

Happy anniversary, you stupid fucks!

happy anniversary

I remember once seeing someone on my dash declare that it was immoral to throw your apple cores on the ground because a field mouse could eat the seeds and die of cyanide poisoning. which has just stuck in my mind forever, because there are wild native apples. it’s fine. and apple orchards aren’t exactly carpeted in mouses carcasses. it’s literally always fine. anyways the same person also encouraged their followers to seek out and kill invasive sparrows, despite native endangered sparrows looking virtually indistinguishable even to ornithologists, so uh. I dunno. no broad point I’m trying to make here, just sometimes this all pops into my head while I’m walking around getting groceries or whatever

why go to the grocery store or to a restaurant when you can just get food delivered why go to the mall when you can get same day shipping on amazon why go to the library when you have kindle why make art when there’s ai why go to the cinema when you can stay at home and watch netflix. we are in a loneliness epidemic btw

you've heard of death of the author, now get ready for death of the audience: where instead of basing your reaction on a thousand uninformed opinions online, you actually read the text and engage with it

girl help there's people on this post who can't actually read my text

#the way that this is literally how death of the author works lmao

OKAY i'm fucking sick of people who can't read leaving these comments so here we go, we're gonna read Barthes together. hold my hand

Barthes' 1967 essay The Death of the Author (La mort de l'auteur) loosely takes the form of a literary history: he relates the changing attitudes of criticism towards the text and of literature towards criticism down to his day. He is interested in what writing is, and thus, what a book is: "a tissue of signs," which the critic claims to be able to interpret. But Barthes argues that once the necessity of connecting the author to the book is removed, the critic has no work to do: "Once the Author is gone, the claim to 'decipher' a text becomes quite useless." This is a rejection of both the supremacy of the critic and the intentions of the author.

When Barthes says "critic," he doesn't "anyone who has encountered the text," however. He differentiates the critic from the "reader":

For Barthes, the reader's understanding of the text is supreme because it weaves together the "tissue of signs" into a coherent whole, producing a singular interpretation. He concludes by advocating for the overthrow of the critical establishment in favor of individual interpretation: "to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author." In other words, in order for us to allow readers their own experiences, we must stop prioritizing the critic -- not the reader, but the critic -- and instead allow the reader to engage the text.

We're gonna un-Barthes Barthes now, okay? Stay with me. Here's the context:

Barthes was responding to a stifling and rigid environment in which criticism was the sole province of the academic expert. As part of the deconstructionist wave, he wanted to upend the traditional hierarchy that dictated how a text should be understood and what it was for, instead prioritizing language and reaction.

He got his wish. We live in a world of reaction.

Gone is the tyranny of the formal critic; gone even is the formal literary education of the reader. Our "tissue of signs" is no longer the text, but an infinite mirrored hall of reactions to reactions to reactions in which the text diminishes into a vanishing point, as the Author once did on Barthes' literary stage.

We do not need to resist the tyranny of the academy. The academy has been destroyed. Adjunctification, the widespread corporatization of universities, the resulting devaluation of college degrees, the devastation of humanities departments in widespread shutdowns, and now the revocation of billions of dollars of government funding have left the academy on its knees. Public trust in academic expertise has declined so sharply that people on this very hellsite will tell you that if someone has an advanced degree in a specific field, that actually makes them less trustworthy.

And in Ozymandias' place, we have the reader.

The reader consumes a variety of "content" and regurgitates its reactions in a variety of "posts." It transmutes text into more text which further readers wriggle eagerly through, refining what might have had meaning into a rarefied fertilizer of emotion and echo. What it leaves behind becomes the literary history for new strata of reactions, nostalgia, and imitation.

This is the audience: an ouroboros of interpretation, a rat king of readership. It has no end but itself. Ultimately, it needs no text to function. In this world, the truly radical act is to disentangle yourself from the other worms and rebuild the edifice of meaning. This may require you to do such tasks as "read the actual book," but because we no longer have the support -- however oppressive -- of literary criticism to inform our reading, we must also learn how to read, explore the historical context on our own, and recover both the facts and the symbols from which the text is woven.

That is what death of the audience means: not a rejection of the critic in favor of language, but a rejection of endless language and infinite readers in favor of fact, history, and skill.

It's a pun, by the way: "La mort de l'auteur," spoken aloud, recalls Le Morte d'Arthur, a 15th-century collection of Arthurian legend which marked the turn away from the Middle Ages and into a nostalgic Early Modern period which valorized them. The Author becomes the mythic King; as myth, he can be severed from fact and dismissed.

Fact has now itself become the myth.

Fucking read.

lesbian heated rivalry wouldn’t be in hockey because there are already many out queer women in hockey due to the fact that hockey is viewed as a men’s sport. the whole reason hockey is captivating for mlm is because it is a toxically masculine sport and the idea of having out queer men in that sport is surprising (requiring them to stay closeted/have situationships/etc), whereas it is not nearly as surprising for queer women. therefore, lesbian heated rivalry would actually occur in a setting like ballet, gymnastics, or some other stereotypically feminine sport (that has toxic feminine standards) where queer women are not as visible. in this essay i will

WE HAVE GOT TO START LOVING THE PROCESS MORE THAN THE PRODUCT AGAIN