what about blorbhov from my complicated russian novel though

blorbeaux from my nilihist french plays

blorbón from my weird latin american magical realist novels

blorbug from my kafkaesque short stories

von blorbow from my german sturm und drang novel

Don Blorbo from my opera

błórbżo from my polish poetry

blorbocles from my ancient greek epics

Mr. Blorby from my Jane Austen novels

Blorbio from my early modern plays

Assembling some more from the notes:

And the kicker:

useless rosetta stone

Waiting for Blorbot

Blorby Blorboby from my long winded Dickens novel!

Finblorbin from my Tolkien novel.

GUESS WHO TURNED 30 TODAY!

That’s right! The world’s oldest (documented) cat! Her name is Flossie. She was born a stray in Liverpool in late 1995.

since she looks a bit sad and ponderous in the photos above, here are some pictures of her with her owner a few years back:

Flossie is emanating an aura of authority, definitely boss of that household

She looks like someone found a pile of crumbs on the floor and glued them together into a cat shape.

One of the more compelling aspects of the murderbot diaries to me is the lateral violence. Especially how it's not depicted in any kind of moralising or judgemental way, meant to teach a very special lesson. It just is, existing because of who the protagonist is, the life it's led, and the world it lives in.

I'm talking about stuff like all the DeltFall and GreyCris secunits killed and unmourned in All Systems Red, because that's what secunits are for. It's easy to forget (or not even notice) they're people, because the protagonist doesn't think of constructs, including itself, as people.

Or how its empathy and care for the human contractors in Artificial Condition constrasts starkly with how brutally it interacts with the comfortunit. Tapan and the comfortunit are both being exploited by the same person, they both ask for help. They even look a bit similar, in the few features Murderbot takes note of. And there are so many complicated reasons why it speaks gently to Tapan, and makes sure she eats, and lets her sleep next to it for comfort, while every interaction with the comfortunit is hostile or violent.

Interestingly, it seems to treat bots pilots better than constructs. It really has internalized hatred of constructs, or any human-adjacent bots like Miki.

incredible video and also PSA: art competition for anyone interested

^^^ direct link for artists!!!

Got my dad a Gen Z slang guide for Christmas specifically so he can do this with his students. Also, the competition sounds fun.

how to open a bag of rice correctly

they pronounced her dead and tried to give her a proper burial 😭 this must have been terrifying in the moment but that’s a little sweet and a little funny, I’m glad she made it out unscathed

This is so… idk. It’s really fascinating that they do that and the implications for animals’s capacity to feel empathy are huge.

I just can’t get out of my mind how badly an elephant will FUCK YOU UP if they’re angry at you. Like if you try to walk up to one, they can get defensive and will fight you. Only it’s not a fight.

Like, I think they’re justified most of the time. But it’s a fascinating range of emotions for one type of animal to have.

I think we have a skewed view of elephants in the west since most of the famous stories of them that pass into pop culture are circus elephants that killed their handlers or elephants that charged European safari hunters. You should never approach a wild animal but generally speaking, they only harm humans when humans are attempting to harm them or their herd. They’re social creatures like dogs, horses and cows so they bond with others well and pose little risk to those who they consider community members which is why humans have tried to domesticate them for 4,500 years with some success.

TL;DR: Elephants usually only fuck you up when you’re trying to fuck them up and they’re capable of bonding with humans and seeing them as intelligent and capable beings.

Good lord, mosquitos killed even more people than people!

I know I haven't posted regularly on this blog in years but I'm not seeing a whole lot of posts on this site about what's happening in Minneapolis right now. And the posts I am seeing are not covering the scope of it. I'm genuinely surprised because tumblr is usually where I find out about things organically through my feed. So I'm making a post about it.

A brief summary of events, from someone who pays attention and also lives here, best taken with a grain of salt and some fact checking:

2020: George Floyd is murdered by Minneapolis police. There are weeks of protests about it. It makes national news. Protests happen in DC. The infamous Trump and his bible photo shoot happens.

2024: Gov. Tim Walz is Kamala Harris' running mate in the presidential election. He starts the "they're just weird" thing. Is folksy, Trump personally hates him.

November 2025: ICE starts showing up to "crack down" on "illegal immigrants" in our Somali community. I may remember the numbers wrong, but something like 90% of our Somali neighbors are either naturalized or were born here. People distribute ICE whistles and are on high alert. Localized to the twin cities.

December 2025: Nick Shirley is paid by a bunch of MN Republicans to do an exposé on daycare fraud. I didn't hear much about this. All I really know is this was an ongoing investigation that MN officials were already taking care of and some of the guilty parties have already gone to court from a COVID era food assistance program. Mostly, if not all, legal US citizens. He did a really bad job at doing journalism and just showed up to day cares with a camera crew and went "YUP nobody's here" as if they weren't in lock-down procedure because some fuck ass white men showed up with camera equipment that could easily be mistaken for guns. I believe. I will fact check all of this and will correct myself in a reblog if necessary. (source but not all the details that I remember hearing about but they said there was no recorded evidence of fraud)

Conservative internet explodes. Kristi Noem sends a mess of agents. I know it's more than a thousand more. They call it Operation Metro Surge. They are going everywhere. There are protests. People try to interrupt the arrests. It's a lot.

1/7/2026: Renee Nicole Good is shot by an ICE agent in the middle of a protest. A few blocks away from where George Floyd was killed. Broad daylight. In front of a crowd. While she was following instructions to turn her vehicle around. Jonathan Ross, the piece of shit Nazi who did it, was recording on his phone the whole time, switched his phone to his non dominant hand so he could more effectively shoot her in the face from 2 feet away. Claims self defense, several angles immediately disprove him. He releases his video, he calls her a "fucking bitch" as her corpse drives away. Does not help him at all. (source) He has not been seen since. Some photos/reports exist of a bunch of agents showing up to his house and taking some tubs and art away. His wife is an immigrant. (source but it's the daily mail so grain of salt.)

Not hours later they go raid a school and tear gas a bunch of kids. (source). Minneapolis has switched to distance learning. I'm not sure about St. Paul.

The last week: There are up to 3,000 ICE agents here. Keep in mind Minneapolis and St. Paul only have 600 or fewer police officers each. So these dudes are roaming in packs. It's 2-4 dudes to a car and 2-5 cars per pack. People are "commuting with" ICE agents to honk and alert people that they're there. People are going on patrols with their neighbors.

ICE is no longer asking "are you a citizen." They are simply walking up to you and taking you into custody. They are going door to door. They have started just breaking the door down if you don't comply. They are driving recklessly to just grab pedestrians and drivers alike (source). People are afraid to go get groceries. It's all over the state. I am learning names of cities in places I thought were just factory farm land and I've lived here my whole life because they're doing raids there. I had to text my family in the suburbs because I saw reports of my small little hometown an hour away getting door knocks today.

It's insane and I am not doing it justice. There are thousands of masked federal agents roaming around all of Minnesota with no warrant or specific goal. They are just trolling around looking for people. They are detaining anyone and everyone. They are beating people. They are pepper spraying people. They are kidnapping people. They are acting unconstitutionally, aggressively, and unpredictably. They are creating situations that are dangerous so that they can try to justify beating or shooting their way out. I will run an errand and then get fed a tiktok that was shot from the Cub Foods that I just left and there's 20+ ICE vehicles parked there now. They're taking people from work, from day care, from schools, from shopping centers.

Iceout.org tracks ice sightings. This is a screen shot with the date set to 12/1/2025.

And from today.

They have cut off SNAP and WIC benefits. Just for us. Not any other state, just Minnesota. They're saying it's because of fraud but I think it's because they hate that we use federal funds to give free breakfast and lunch to every public school student.

And this is breaking just now, 1/13/2026: the DOJ is trying to investigate Renee Good's widow. 4 people have resigned about it. (source). I don't even want to read the article to see what they're saying.

So that's a brief history.

Unicorn Riot is doing a lot of good reporting and they don't seem to have the spin that a lot of local news stations will have where they downplay everything. This article specifically goes into a lot of the specific instances of brutality.

It's also a rumor on TikTok that all of the videos of ICE and protests and the such and the like are being geo locked. So my feed is all footage of people being detained and talking about the "commuting" they're doing and what they're seeing but people outside of the state are not seeing it. So if you're also on that infernal app, try searching for Minneapolis or Minnesota and see what you see. I'm kind of curious if this is true. Because I've been living and breathing ICE and doomsday prepping content for a week. I'm sure those two topics aren't connected.

I don't really know what my goal with this post is. I'm tired. I'm in the first ring of suburbs, so it's been pretty quiet. But I have friends in south Minneapolis. And I'm worried for them. And I know it's a matter of time before my quiet pocket is affected. Because they're coming door to door.

Pay attention to Minnesota, I think an example is being made of us.

I've been monitoring this closely because I have friends in the area, and because I think every city in the country is at risk of having the feds come to do what they're doing in Minnesota, and we all need to get ready.

There are some Twin Cities activists who have been very clearly laying out what they're doing, and why it's effective at slowing down ICE. It sounds like all you really need, is neighborhood group chats where people can let one another know when and where ICE is present, and then people show up, start recording, and blowing whistles, and then ICE will leave again more often than not. This VERY SHORT thread by a Twin Cities activist outlines what to do and how it works.

Also: Minnesota Public Radio has been doing great coverage of what's happening, and the local NBC affiliate has some excellent interviews with activists who were arrested and detained for hours.

And finally, some good news: the courts restored SNAP funding.

I love that, like. He KNOWS the audience want to clap and so he's using them as an extra instrument. He turns around and goes hey, stop, and hopes they understand conductor gestures and it works, and then he has clapping he can use when he wants

This is genuinely so good

For folks in the notes very upset that she only has two babies left: These baby possums are of dispersion size - they're big enough to leave mom and fend for themselves. These two are just the ones who haven't moved out yet.

Oh wow I had no idea they were so tiny when they left home! Our possums in Australia don't have as many babies so they're generally 1/3 to 1/2 the size of the mum when they get kicked out.

I would definitely assume a baby opossum was abandoned if I hadn't been told otherwise.

Every year wildlife rehabs are delivered many perfectly healthy baby possums for this exact reason and generally, it means they get a little boost of assured safety, food, and hydration before being released. Imagine, you're newly 18 and starting your adult life - you're just kind of walking around, maybe on your way to community college or something, and a Kindly Cosmic Horror picks you up, carries you to a fancy hotel where you are given several really excellent meals and maybe receive a series of vaccinations, then you are dropped into a resource-rich area approximately nearby where the first Kindly Cosmic Horror picked you up. This is how life is for young Virginia possums every spring.

Everything about this delights me.

lady of rohan <3

Period appropriate clothing (I think)!

                                                                          —  The Corbomite Maneuver

                                                                         —  The Trouble With Tribbles

                                                               —  What Are Little Girls Made Of?

                                                                                                             —  Miri

                                                                                            —  Wrath of Kahn

                                                                     —  The Conscience of the King 

KIRK: Your report covers all vegetation?

SULU: All vegetation is inedible, poison to us.

McCOY: If the Enterprise has been destroyed, do you know how long we can survive?

KIRK: Yes.

-That Which Survives

Oh.

some early sauron concepts from this summer before i finished with this one

baby mairon, maybe mordor-era sauron? post eregion? and third age sauron, looking like someone just dug him out of a ditch

i really wanted the second one to have a very snakey kind of vibe

might recycle these concepts and develop them further!!

Noo Sauron don't lean on your sword you'll mess it up!

I actually think the real advantage tumblr has over other websites is the ability of "reblogging" to create posts with contributions from multiple users. This allows people to build on others' posts, whether that's derailing them with a terrible joke, drawing the scenario proposed as a comic, answering the question posed originally in lively essay format, or rewriting the previous interaction as a scene in Shakespearean iambic pentameter.

This is also why Tumblr is hard to make profitable. Individual users have relatively little power to create good content. It's interactions between users that actually creates the good content, and therefore, no one involved in the good stuff on Tumblr can really claim to "own" it or be the "creator."

Posts have to navigate through Tumblr to pick up the people that can add to them in a constructive way, and then when users interact, the whole interaction can spread across the website as a new evolution of the content. There's no way to simplify this process.

Theres a whole ecosystem running here. It's not as simple as Creators and Consumers, and you can't simplify it to that. That's not how ART works, let alone posts. There's symbiosis. The users that do the nitrogen fixation aren't the ones photosynthesizing. The detritivores can't also be the predators. The "rappers doing normal shit blog" has a different niche than the person that asks why Lil Wayne has socks on in the jacuzzi, who has a different niche than the person who says "those are his hooves, you bitch!"

It's like bioavailability, you see. The user that responds "Those are his hooves, you bitch" is like a predator on a high trophic level, unable to directly feed on producers, needing primary consumers to convert the post into a form that makes a punch line possible.

[ID: A screenshot of the original post with almost every line fully blacked out. The only letters still visible spell out "cocks." End ID]

Enter THE HOTEL OF THE MINDSCAPE.

HOTEL I think the sole advantage of this place, This hellish, warping, twisted tumbler, Lies buried in collaborative art. When sings again the song, another may The words repeat, and add upon their tale. To make a jest, or illustrate the piece, To answer, mock, or Shakespearificate.

This, too, is why 'tis hard to draw out gold: Thou cannot draw a pail from show'ring rain, Thou cannot catch the desert in a net, And, similar, thou cannot find the source Of so-called "content" when 'tis all around.

When written first, a song begins its life, But not the whole of art it has within -- To breathe the air of life and light and wit It must be shared, improved, attached upon, And then, at last, the multi-headed beast Can reach its full potential in its song.

This place is like a forest, ground to leaf, With bears and fish and bees and trees and worms. 'Tis not the simple "made, and then consumed", For, truly, art 'tis never simply that. There's symbiosis in these darkened woods, There's ebb and flow, the predator and prey: When songs are written of the Little Wayne, And of his hot tub stocking hooves most fine, The gentles here who say "they're hooves, you bitch" Are just as vital as the author's song. Each word in verse is sung by someone new, And in this way, the poem comes to fruit.

For though the wolf who stalks across the heath Takes diff'rent station than the grass beneath, Still, both are needed in this wood we carve, For with no grass for sheep, the wolves would starve.

Enter FALSE PUCHIKO, the CLOWN.

CLOWN 'Tis well and truly said, Madame Hotel, But please consider this riposte: a cock.

This is a old post and I have never seen this addition. Brilliant.

Acceptable reasons for humans in reality to burst into song: It’s a concert or a rehearsal or something.

Acceptable reasons for people in Lord of the Rings to burst into song: We are in a kings hall, we are in a pub, we are about to eat some really nice food, we have just eaten some really nice food, there is a pretty tree, there is a pretty rock, there are lots of pretty trees, It’s raining, it’s stopped raining, there is a pretty tree, we are going into battle tomorrow, orcs are ugly, my ancestor was cool, my ancestor was shit, my ancestor was cooler than yours dispite starting this shit, I miss home, I don’t miss home, oh look some grass, the past is a thing that existed and it was shit, the past is a thing that existed and it was awesome, I am in love, there is a river, there is a pretty tree, my ancestor was a tree, we’re on horses now, I’m bored, I’m hungry, someone has died, elves exist, men exist, hobbits exist, dwarfs exist, 10,000 years ago there was a pretty lady, my ancestor was a pretty lady, someone else has died, my sword is cool, my sword is cooler, my ancestor had a sword once he named it Jeff, oh look a tree, I love trees, I am vibing with this monolith, this tree is now officially my bestie, there is a pretty city somewhere, there is an ugly city somewhere, I’ve killed something, I want to kill something, I don’t want to kill something, oh look a wife, I have a wife, I have a son, I am drunk, I am scared, I am bored, once there was this lady she was so pretty everyone she looked at died of awe, you’re pretty, I am pretty, I wish I was home, I wish I was a tree, oh look stars, my ancestor was a star.

We're doing the dishes and mocking a hobbit

I feel like this was actually kind of realistic for medieval times. You didn't have much entertainment, but singing is free.

To all trans men on this site, im gonna put you onto something. If you are in need of a binder but have unsupportive parents or are closeted, if you have a fondness for the ocean, or if youre bored with the normal colors of binder available, go to Waterlust and get a top

As you can see above, theyre all patterned like marine life, but theyre also reversible! One side has the pattern, the other is solid color, and they're all fun colors like blues and reds and greens, but some like the whale and tiger shark ones are more subtle grays and blacks. I have the whale shark one and the spongebob one (which was a limited run), and theyre both very well designed and printed. My spongebob one has served me for roughly four years and it hasn't worn at all.

What really matters? The binding power, and these things are great. I'm a triple D cup and with a medium I look like I have subtle pecs. They're also much less compressive than other binders due to their materials (which are mostly recycled!), so you can wear them for longer without getting sore. When I did more intensive theater and band performances, I could still act, dance, and play bari sax without getting winded or hurting myself. They're also swim tops, and I've scuba dived in these as well comfortably.

If that wasn't all, proceeds from each purchase are donated towards marine conservation and education initiatives! Purchasing shark printed ones specifically donate to shark studies and conservation orgs, parrotfish and coral prints support coral restoration initiatives, and so on. The high price tag is for a good reason.

Overall, if you're looking for an all around good binder, one that matches your whimsey and supports a good cause, Waterlust is the place to go.