How does anyone hate kids they are so funny I sold tickets to incredibles to this little girl and her mom and she’s like mom are we sitting next to each other and the moms like ya and the kid screamed YES so loud it broke my ears
The other day I was bringing an older gentleman up the hill in a golf cart and we drove past this huge YMCA group of kids like 100 kids
and driving past the first chunk like 10 of them yelled out “let me on” in unison and then since I’m driving so slowly to be safe, halfway in some kid leaned up and said “do you play fortnite” and I told him I played a little and he just pointed and shouted “THIS GUY PLAYS FORTNITE” and then like 20 kids started talking to me all at once about fortnite
A kid asked me if I lived in the ambulance. I said yes.
The hero we deserve
When I was on register at Kohl’s a little girl came through with her grandma and she was so very excited to tell me the meaning of her name (I think it was like warrior of god) and she begged her grandma for her phone so she could google to find out what my name means too
i wear two spinner rings on one finger and one time at my last job a young girl (probably 6-8) said “your ring is very pretty” and when i showed her it was two rings she GASPED and said “does that mean you’re marrying two people?!”
I have this necklace with a mermaid on it that I wear to work a lot and I got asked by a kid if it gave me magic powers. I leaned in real close and told her in a low voice it gave me magical girl powers but it was a secret. She got this real serious look on her face and said to her mom “that lady has superpowers, don’t tell anyone or the government will take her away”.
The other day i had to give a speech at my school despite my horrific fear of public speaking and afterwards i had kid come up to me and say well done to me. It was so cute.
god I love tiny kids
there was a kid in one of our science camps and he spent the whole week in a lab coat and goggles screaming “CHEMICALS” at the top of his lungs. he wouldn’t even tell us his name for the first two days just screamed CHEMICALS instead.
I was watching these kids at church today and one of them screamed and threw a toy car into the wall and it broke and the other one looked over calmly and said “does your insurance cover that?”
I was taking the drink order for a family at work and I asked their kid what he wanted to drink and he just looked at me with a completely deadpan expression and said “vodka” and me and the parents just fucking lost it
kid I used to babysit asked why my lips were different (she was two), and when I told her that it was because I was wearing lipstick, she yelled, “MAYA, I WANT LIPITZ.”
I work in a school and every time I draw anything on the board (I am a terrible artist and usually resort to stick men), the kids will all go ‘I love your picture, that’s a great drawing Miss’. So blindly supportive.
One time my younger brother ordered a “non-alcoholic fanta” at a hotel bar and the bartender lost his shit and I was never the same man
When I was student teaching, I was taking my fourth graders back from lunch and noticed one little girl looking longingly at the playground, where the younger kids were having recess. She heaved a big sigh and said, “I used to be that free.”
oh my god little kids in the library are the BEST one time i was looking for a book and a little girl tried to help me cause we always help HER find the books she wants. sometimes when i’m helping them check out they’ll tell me about the books they’re getting. i know so much about dog man.
oh man! another hilarious thing kids in the library do! they will straight up TELL ON THEIR PARENTS!
mom: the book was like that when we checked it out
child, innocently confused: i thought (little brother) did that though?
dad: yes that’s our correct address and phone number
child, barely paying attention: we MOOOOVED!! :D
parent: we never checked that book out
child, trying to be helpful: yes we did, that’s the one we lost at grandma’s house, remember?
me, fighting laughter and trying to decide whether or not the enter the child’s testimony as official evidence or not
I know I’ve told this story on Tumblr before, but one of my favorite retail experiences was when I was stocking shelves once and dropped a couple of small plastic toys, and a little girl ZOOMED up, grabbed them, held them up to me, and when I thanked her, said “I’m closer to the floor, so it’s TEAMWORK! :D” and zoomed off back to her mom
I was telling a kindergarten class (4/5 year olds) that we’re hosting a book fair next week and they would need to ask their parents for money. One girl very excitedly told me she has “one money” in her piggy bank. Her classmate, vibrating with excitement, said, “I have TOO MUCH money! I have ten dollars!”
a little boy, maybe around 7, looked at our piano at the museum and asked me very politely, “why doesn’t it have all 88 keys?”
I googled it for him after the tour, because even I didn’t know how many keys a piano was meant to have, or why this one had fewer (earlier pianos were just Like That, seems to be the answer)
we love baby nerds in this house
a marathon route ran past my apartment this morning and from my window I heard a small child yell at the top of her lungs, utterly bewildered, “WHERE ARE THEY ALL GOING???”
we have two niblings, and they like to draw with me when they visit. they’re recently getting into Star Wars and wanted to draw some characters from that.
me: okay, who will we draw?
older nibling, as expected: luke! BB-8!
me: alright, cool-
younger nibling, loudly and with conviction: COUNT DOOKU!!!!!!
*casually draping my arm around your shoulder and gesturing with my other hand*
Now hear me out, pal, what if– what if I think ALL culture, art and writing are important and worth preserving, regardless of who wrote it and whether or not they’re deemed marketable by the capitalist institution?
I went to an exhibition of folk art once at a major national gallery. It was so vibrant and fascinating and culturally important - more so in a lot of ways than some of the art in the main galleries because this was art made by common people as something for pleasure or to express something in their lives. Sometimes it was made as a commission for someone but not for the aristocracy necessarily, it was made to be lived with and to be enjoyed.
The other notable thing about this exhibition was that it was so sparse.
Folk art, craft, it isn’t kept. It doesn’t last. A rich person hasn’t deemed it the cream of the crop and declared it to be worth a whole bunch of money so unless it is kept out of sheer love, it disappears when it’s owner is gone. It’s an ephemeral act of craft and creativity made by people that might be an expert in their specific field but one that isn’t currently deemed ‘high art’ or commercially popular or just plain fashionable enough to be kept after the owner or the artist is gone.
Sometimes this can be because the creators are marginalised groups and sometimes they don’t have the access to artistic and creative training. Sometimes they are just doing something they love and are good at but which no one else appreciates at that point in time.
Sometimes their motivations aren’t based in getting published or bought by collectors or whatever. Sometimes someone just wants to create.
The act of creating is what makes art art. It’s the intention. It’s not the result.
So yeah. Like. Fuck you dickweed. Not everything is about you and not everything is for you.
I’m an archivist and historian by profession, and a volunteer with AO3 since 2010. Often the most interesting and significant things in archives are things that were never “meant” to be preserved (notes in margins, candid photos, fliers and posters and ephemera). And AO3 absolutely serves as an archive, so saying that it doesn’t “really” archive or preserve things is actively stupid and false. For instance, AO3’s Open Doors project preserves and saves fanworks from sites that are defunct or no longer maintained, and is engaged in digitizing paper zines from the pre-internet period. That is 100% the definition of archiving and preserving material that would otherwise be lost.
But archives (I mean real, professional, official archives staffed by people with advanced degrees who get paid to be there) also have projects that look very much like AO3. For instance, many archives organized ways for people to submit materials about their experiences during COVID-19. This includes stuff like: poetry, diary entries, personal reflections, people’s feelings and thoughts. People self-submitting their own written material, unfiltered, honest, not highly polished or professionally published, was like gold to archives.
So, you might say, ok, that’s people reflecting about an important historical event, that tells future historians things they will want to know, that’s important. Not like AO3.
Now let’s imagine that we could discover a lost body of ordinary people’s writing from 100 or 300 or 500 years ago. A huge collection of the things everyday people, not just elite wealthy highly educated men, were thinking about, their fantasies and fears and hopes and things they loved, and how they felt about the books they read or the plays they saw or the music they listened to, from 1900 or 1700 or 1500. People’s writings, in their own words, without a filter. The graffiti at Pompeii, or Onfim’s writing lessons, or Ea-Nasir’s hate mail, but in 50k or 500k word installments instead of 5 or 10 or 50 word snippets. That would be, and I’m not exaggerating here, a literal gold mine for historians and literary scholars and linguists and anthropologists and all kinds of other fields. It would be the source material for countless research projects and dissertations and books.
Now, historical value isn’t particularly why I work on and contribute my writing to AO3. I work on AO3 because I think having a secure and reliable site, that isn’t vulnerable to whims and technical failures and changing policies, that is free to use and free of advertising, where people can safely post their fanworks is important. I think giving enjoyment and relaxation and comfort to people is worthwhile in and of itself, even if it wasn’t a contribution to the historical record.
But it fucking chaps my hide AS A HISTORIAN to have people say “ah, this collection of ordinary people’s writing, it’s pointless and meaningless, no one cares,” when that is an overt lie. Tell me you’ve never talked to a historian in your fucking life without telling me you’ve never talked to a historian in your fucking life. Historians eat this stuff up with a spoon.
Interactive fiction is a very specific medium of storytelling which combines the best features of a book with the most engaging elements of a choice-based game. It allows the reader (player?) to create their own character and make choices that influence the way the story progresses and how their character interacts with their environment.
This, arguably, makes interactive fiction one of the most immersive ways of engaging with a story!
Its unique blend of a novel and a game makes for a genre of fiction which is;
1. Incredibly immersive and dynamic
2. Very accessible and convenient
3. Characterised by a very active and close-knit community of readers
There are so many stories of all sorts and genres, so it is almost guaranteed that you will find something that fits your preferences. Some of the most popular, and (in my opinion) some of the best, titles include:
- The Wayhaven Chronicles, by Mishka Jenkins
- Fallen Hero, by Malin Rydén
- Samurai of Hyuga, by Devon Connell
- Can I add my own work in progress? I don’t know, but I will. The Pioneer Project is on its way ;)
I would encourage everyone who hasn’t experienced interactive fiction yet to pick up a story that sounds interesting and try it out. I think the genre is criminally underrated, and we haven’t even scratched the surface of what is possible with this medium of storytelling!
one thing i find really difficult about navigating the IF space is the direct line of contact between readers and authors. we share the same space, and i think that plays a big part in this weird blurred line we have in this community and overall lack of boundaries.
for a lot of people this is a fun hobby and while i personally try to keep it… semi-professional most of the time, it’s easy to get wrapped up in having fun on tumblr (or the forums, or reddit, wherever it is that you mainly post/interact) and have a lot of personal interactions with both readers and authors alike - which is fun! i like it more often than not, but i also think that’s why a lot of comments in this space can end up being really entitled, over-familiar, and inappropriate.
it’s no secret that most authors get really weird messages on here, and while this is also a problem on social media at large and not just specific to IF tumblr, it is still definitely a big problem in this community.
and to be clear i’m not saying that you can’t be friendly with authors or readers (i’ve become friends with a handful of readers myself) and i definitely don’t mean to imply that there needs to be a huge divide between us; that’s silly - again, most authors are readers, most readers are authors, we’re just people on the internet sharing the same space. but all of us deserve to have our boundaries respected. this is my story, and we are strangers. as a general rule of thumb: if you wouldn’t say it out loud to someone you just met, you probably shouldn’t be saying it to a stranger online. especially anonymously.
[Image description: Pacific Rim meme of three screenshots of Hermann Gottlieb pointing at an enormous chalkboard with his cane. Text reads: “In the beginning the bot accounts were spaced apart 24 weeks. Then 12, then 6, then every 2 weeks. In 4 days we could be seeing a bot every 8 hours until they are coming every 4 minutes. We should witness a double event within seven days.”]
Fandom is not about cancellable opinions it’s about sharing and spreading art and fics and gif sets and poetry and showering each other in praise and tearing up because someone said something nice about a thing you made and writing posts that say reblog to give the person you reblogged this from a kiss on the forehead actually
