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Kill The Lights

@seraphica / seraphica.tumblr.com

Minnesota | '90 | she/her
You can call me Seraphica, Sera, Suzuka, Suz, or whatever else strikes your fancy.
If I ever share a post or comment that is insensitive or needs correction, please let me know!

My current not-approved-by-the-government opinion is that im not anyone's parent and i should not be responsible for random teenagers online. If I post smth thats 'meant for adults' and its labled as such then what happens from there is literally not my problem. If a teen- who is fully capable of turning on self moderation settings on their own btw- doesn't use a site's provided self moderation settings and they see boobs or dicks then like literally whatever, its neither the end of the world or a big deal. It shouldn't fall on me or a website or a tech company to do a parent's job, and also frankly i don't think a parent should be breathing down their 16 year old's neck on the off chance they do actually want to look at tits, but thats a discussion that americans will fucking throw a fit at so maybe we'll discuss that another day in better company.

"But what about young children!!" see thats! where parents should be involved- that is to say, why are you letting your young child on the internet in the first place, you fucking idiot.

i love my YouTube watch later list - got some time to kill? pick something that caught my eye months or years ago

but occasionally this happens

it evokes a timbre of loss i don't think i've felt anywhere else. something i know for sure i wanted is gone forever, but i can't even remember what it was.

The Qamar 717 centres on a handwritten letter Salloum’s grandmother (tata) wrote in January 1967 to Jordanian authorities, pleading for the release of Salloum’s grandfather (sedo), a political figure detained in the West Bank for his role in the Palestinian liberation movement. “She travelled to Jordan hoping to see him, but was denied visitation. Fearing for his life, she wrote the letter in desperation,” Salloum explains. “It was filled with urgency and resolve—words crossed out, thoughts revised. But in the end, only the draft remained. No one in my family knows what happened next.”

Ouran high school was my favourite anime when I was like 14 which is really funny because thats also the age I basically was in a Haruhi fujioka situation. Not like fully literally but the meat of it was the same

I was the one single middle-class kid in a super high-end rich kid private academy with like pressed uniforms and building wings and everything. I didnt get any sort of scholarship, my dad just got a job as a teacher there and teachers kids got to enroll for free because the tuition was like 30 grand a year and you arent affording that on a teacher salary. So I understand her on a very visceral level and perhaps enjoyed OHSHC so much because she was SOOO me fr. These damn rich people

One time I convinced my classmates that I had never had sushi before because we were too poor to afford it just so they would pay for my sushi dinner and it worked. They were so out of touch that they thought I didnt have the money for anything more expensive than fast food. I did in fact take advantage of this partially because every teenager is a shithead and I was not exempt from that rule and partially because I knew they had more money than god so it was a totally victimless crime. A classmate once bought 2 copies of The Last Guardian on release just because they thought I "deserved a new game." They thought I couldnt afford a new video game and I said nothing

This experience also made me utterly immune to the "rich people shit is when [middle class thing]" discourse on this site. Because ive directly experienced rich people shit and its NOT when someone goes to NYU or gets Starbucks on their breaks at the job they have to work to afford their mortgage.

Rich people shit is when I had to yell at my classmates that we are not spending tens of thousands of dollars ON BALLOONS for our prom when we had a DJ to pay and their response to me was "thats only 700 dollars per person."

Rich people shit is when I went to go tutor one of my classmates little brothers who was struggling with history and it took him 10 minutes to go get his tablet from his bedroom and come back to the kitchen table because their house was that big, which was being cleaned by a live-in maid while their private chef made us snacks the entire time I was tutoring him. And then their parents paid me 500 bucks and told me "sorry I seem to have misplaced my other wallet, is this enough? Its not a lot :(("

Rich people shit is when the other teachers kids and I breezed through school with high GPAs because all of our peers had so much money that they never had to care about getting into a good university or having careers or budgeting or anything, so they never tried.

Rich people shit is when youre invited to a little get together on the weekends and get told to bring an overnight bag because their definition of a little get together is an overnight yacht trip. And then you get there and find out that your middle class definition of what's needed for an overnight trip is VERY different from a rich persons definition of the same thing: you have some pajamas, clean underwear, toothpaste, and some soap and face wash, maybe some moisturizer. They bring half their wardrobes and designer personally-commissioned serums that cost more than your house and then tell you that youre "just so quaint."

So much discourse around whos rich and whos not comes from people who have never been in a rich persons reality and so they end up shooting directly above them and calling that rich. But I tell you from personal experience that rich people are uniquely disconnected from reality and anybody who has to work for a living is by definition NOT rich. I dont care if they have a big suburban house and 2 new cars and go on vacations a lot, thats not RICH. Rich is when their kids think 700 dollars is pocket change for prom balloons and have their own personal yacht to take their friends on whenever they want, not when someone goes to fucking NYU.

A lot of you on here sure don’t like the idea of making any kind of sacrifice for the benefit of others huh

Some of you act like doing minor inconvenient acts of kindness is equivalent to donating a kidney as if it’s not those acts that form our communities and make the world go around.

Return your grocery cart. If you’re able-bodied offer your seat to someone who is not. Help your friend move. Drive your sister to the airport. Make sure drunk people have a safe ride or walk home. Pet-sit for your coworker. Participate in a meal train. Volunteer in your area. That’s what friendship and community is about.

the only reliable, effective way of "protecting children" is education. but people don't want to hear that because they don't actually care about protecting children, they care about protecting a mythologised ideal of innocence

Untitled, 'Not defined by what I lack (2023), one of the surreal images from the inner world of Russian painter, performance artist, and photographer, Ellen Sheidlin (née Elena Viktorovna Lyalina in 1994)

One of my favorite hoaxes was in early 1962. There was a musical that debuted in 1961 called Subways are for Sleeping that was doing very poorly. For bizarre reasons (ads were banned in the New York subway system lest people take it as permission to sleep there) and normal (the reviews were poor).

But in 1962 an ad came out full of effusive praise from every prominent theater critic in New York. Every single one. From the Times to the Post, all of the famous theater critics in New York LOVED Subways Are For Sleeping

Except...

One of the papers paid to run this ad noticed something...off. Namely, that the editor knew Richard Watts the theater critic and he wasn't African-American.

It turns out that the producer of the musical had found seven New Yorkers with the same names as the seven biggest theater critics in New York, since while he couldn't lie and say they liked it, he could pay for *a* John Chapman or *a* Robert Coleman to see the musical and quote them next to their photo truthfully, bc how many people even knew what the leading theater critics in NYC looked like?

Turns out the producer had wanted to do this for ages, but had to wait for the NYT's critic to retire bc he couldn't find anyone with the same name. Anyway it worked: it went from being about to close, to running another hundred shows and winning a Tony

Grateful to everyone who's pointed out the delightful vagueness of "7 OUT OF 7" loved it. 7 out of seven what? Well, seven out of the seven people in the ad of course