cruelty is so easy. youre not special for choosing it
“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
-Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
I know people wanted the post credit scene for the DnD movie to be the actors playing the game, but I think it would have been infinitely funnier if it was instead the characters at a table trying desperately to figure out the date for their next heist. Next weekend? No, there’s a festival. Tuesday. No, have a tournament. Any time in the next month??? Nope, there’s some noble that half the group already agreed to go rough up, they’ll be out of town. Oh hey a letter from Xenk, he can come on Thursdays. Are you penpals with Xenk?! Don’t worry about it.
If someone told me that a submersible named the Titan, owned by a company called OceanGATE, carryingthree billionaires, had gone missing on an expedition to the Titanic, I would think it was some pitch for a new thriller mystery novel and not something that had actually happened due to the hubris and stupidity of rich people.
people love to compliment tiktok’s algorithm on how good it is at showing them updates to videos they’d seen in the past but tumblr, man. tumblr doesn’t even need an algorithm. it’s just a bunch of nosy ass people spreading around the information and it is almost always a reliable system. if i see a post on tuesday the update will come around on my dash by friday without fail
I think my favorite thing in Marie Kondo’s work is the section in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up where she talks about branding and labels contributing to visual clutter.
She explains that if you go through the whole tidying process and still feel cluttered and anxious in your own home, one thing that might help is looking around to see how much visible text and logos there are in your home. It can make you feel like you’re constantly being advertised to, which makes you less comfortable in your living space, because you’re basically in a showroom.
She suggests taking labels off of packages, storing items in different containers if you can, and making sure you take every purchase out of its packaging when you bring it home.
I think about that advice a lot when capitalism starts to get to me and I feel like I’m never gonna escape. Taking all the branding and advertising off of things has genuinely helped make my home feel more like my home. Peeling labels off candles, storing envelopes neatly on a shelf in a plain box, putting flour and sugar in canisters instead of leaving them in the bags, creatively covering logos on my tech…it all helps so much. Like, goddamn, it really made me realize just how much we are constantly being advertised to even when we think we’re not.
