jump, little children made a whole little movie about the quiet, devastating work of trying to be fine in a place with too many cul-de-sacs.
Source: YouTube
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suburban trees are doing a surprising amount of emotional labor
jump, little children made a whole little movie about the quiet, devastating work of trying to be fine in a place with… Read more
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every text message comes with an appeals process
i know what i said. i also know what i meant. unfortunately, the other person received only the first item, and customer… Read more
i know what i said. i also know what i meant. unfortunately, the other person received only the first item, and customer service is now closed.
“i’m so hungry i could eat the gap between what i said and what i meant” appeared on my Tumblr dashboard, and approximately thirteen thousand people recognized the meal. this is because human communication is less like sending a document and more like handing someone three receipts, a weather report, and a look that made perfect sense at the time.
language has always required unpaid interpretive labor
there is a proper philosophical term for some of this: implicature. the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes it as meaning or implying one thing by saying something else. we do it constantly. “it’s getting late” may mean “i should leave,” “you should leave,” or “please acknowledge that time has continued while neither of us made a decision.”
conversation works because people usually cooperate in filling that space. context, tone, facial expression, shared history, and the fact that you have heard me use “interesting” as a death sentence all help.
Photo: Ananian / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0) then we moved a large portion of human intimacy into little gray bubbles and acted surprised when the infrastructure began producing ghosts.
texting preserves the words and invents the weather
a text message removes most of the cues that normally carry the rest of the sentence. it keeps the punctuation, which is unfortunate, because punctuation immediately accepted a second job as emotional telemetry.
“okay” is neutral. “okay!” is enthusiastic. “Okay.” means i need to review the previous six months of our relationship with outside counsel. none of these rules are written down, universally agreed upon, or stable across age groups, which is exactly how we prefer to run critical infrastructure.
dating makes the translation layer worse because everyone is trying to communicate interest without appearing to possess interest. you say “no worries” while manufacturing several worries locally. somebody says “we should do this again,” and the word should enters evidence. a reply takes forty minutes, and your brain produces a limited series about what happened during minutes thirty-two through thirty-seven.
Photo: Australian Aid Photolibrary / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0) anxiety is a very committed copy editor
the problem is not only that other people can misunderstand us. it is that we can misunderstand them with incredible production values.
anxiety takes a message with two possible readings, selects the one that causes the most administrative work, and marks it final. now the gap between what they said and what they meant has been furnished, zoned, and given a small municipal government.
sometimes the subtext is real. people are indirect, conflict-avoidant, flirtatious, scared, or simply hoping to retain plausible deniability. “maybe” has buried entire civilizations. pretending language contains no subtext would be its own kind of illiteracy.
but subtext is not telepathy. silence is not a signed affidavit. response time is evidence mostly of response time. if the answer matters, eventually somebody has to ask the embarrassing direct question and allow the other person to give an actual answer. this is terrible news for those of us who had prepared twelve excellent theories instead.
the appeal may proceed
i would like every message to arrive with expandable fields labeled WHAT I SAID, WHAT I MEANT, and WHAT I AM AFRAID YOU WILL THINK I MEANT. this feature has not shipped.
until then, communication remains a collaborative draft. we say something incomplete, somebody interprets it through the entire haunted library of their experience, and, if we are lucky, both parties stay long enough to compare notes.
the gap is not food, but i have spent a lot of time chewing it.
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the marshmallow does not need you to defend its racist name
a follow-up to the world’s most racist snack: chocolate, nostalgia, and the people making solidarity purchases on behalf of a confectionery label. Read more
There are two kinds of posts on this website: the ones I labored over like they were going to be taught in a seminar someday, and the ones where I embed a strange little video with a title that looks like it was generated by a haunted search bar.
Guess which one Google decided it had opinions about.
In July, I posted a short video about the chocolate-covered marshmallow treats that have, in different places and at different times, been sold under names built out of racist caricatures. It was mostly a “huh, that is bleak” drive-by. Then it started showing up in the site’s search data next to queries like most racist snack, racist snack name, and the world’s most racist snack. Not huge numbers, exactly, but it is now one of the little site’s more persistent visitors. Apparently this is what the people need from taco ’bout it: snack-based colonial hangovers.
it’s a marshmallow, not an archival document
The treat itself is straightforward: a biscuit or wafer base, a whipped marshmallow-ish center, and a chocolate coating. Depending on where you are, a perfectly normal name exists for it: Schokokuss (“chocolate kiss”), Schaumkuss (“foam kiss”), or simply chocolate-coated marshmallow treat.
That is why the usual defense of “it’s just tradition” never quite works for me. Tradition is not a force of nature. It is a series of choices that people keep making because nobody has bothered to make a different one. We managed to put a marshmallow on a wafer and enrobe it in chocolate. Surely we can also call it a chocolate kiss without acting like someone has confiscated grandmother’s entire kitchen.
But the older names that linger in parts of Europe are where it gets ugly. Variants translated to “Moor’s head,” “Negro’s kiss,” and other terms that turn an actual racial category—or an old colonial fantasy of one—into a cute little product description. The point was not just “it’s brown because chocolate.” The imagery attached to those names did the rest: Blackness reduced to a cartoon head, a dark coating, a novelty.
Photo: Tiia Monto / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. the weird part is how small the fix is
No one is asking anyone to stop eating the thing. This is not a campaign against snacks, which would be both doomed and personally offensive to me. It is a request to stop using a name that makes a person’s identity into the punchline and then demanding everybody else treat the discomfort as an overreaction.
And the replacement names are not even bad. “Chocolate kiss” is kind of sweet. “Foam kiss” has the energy of a discontinued 1980s perfume, but it is still leagues better than making a confectionery aisle reenact colonial racism. The food is the same food. The recipe has not been silenced. Nothing has been erased except the part nobody needed.
There is a particular kind of nostalgia that mistakes familiarity for innocence. You grew up hearing a word, so it feels harmless; someone else hears the history packed into it, and suddenly the word is political. But it was already political. It just had the advantage of being old enough to pass as décor.
anyway, congratulations to the algorithm
So yes: the original video is a weirdly effective little piece of internet detritus. It points at something real, it has a title people are apparently compelled to type into a search engine, and now it has earned itself a follow-up post in which I get to say the obvious part out loud.
If you want the snack, have the snack. Just call it a snack. We are all capable of surviving a product rename, even if the internet’s search habits suggest we may never stop being fascinated by the phrase “racist marshmallow.”
Further reading: Swissinfo’s reporting on the Swiss debate and a 2019 study of media responses to the “Mohrenkopf” controversy.
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i have started missing things that are still here
grief is not a loyalty program. there are no points for starting early, and no discount for suffering efficiently. Read more
there is a specific kind of emotional efficiency where you begin grieving something before it has actually left. the relationship is still technically happening. the dog is still asleep in the sun. the apartment still has your furniture in it. the television show has three episodes left. none of this stops your brain from dimming the lights and beginning the memorial slideshow.
i reblogged this because “holy shit i love grieving things before they’re gone” is funny in the way that an accurate diagnosis becomes funny when somebody puts it in lowercase. the addition — “and grieving things that never even happened” — turns it from a personal habit into a complete operating model.
the farewell tour begins immediately
anticipatory grief is a real term. Cleveland Clinic describes it as grief that begins before a loss, often when someone knows a death or major change is coming. that is the serious, useful definition. the less clinical version is that the human brain sees an ending on the horizon and starts pre-sadness as if tickets might sell out.
sometimes this prepares us. sometimes it lets us say what needs saying, pay attention, take pictures, or notice the ordinary details we would otherwise allow to pass without ceremony.
sometimes it simply means we spend the final good month of something acting like its widower.
Photo: ParentingPatch / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0) the cruel little trick is that grief feels productive. worry feels like vigilance, and sadness feels like proof that we understood the stakes. if i rehearse the loss thoroughly enough, perhaps the actual loss will arrive, review my preparation, and waive the fee.
it never does. you can pay grief in advance, and it will still send the full invoice.
the museum of things that never happened
then there is the second category: grieving a future that existed entirely in draft form. a relationship that almost became something. a job you nearly got. the version of yourself who was definitely going to learn a language, move somewhere interesting, and own the correct number of plants.
these losses are especially irritating because there is no clean object to mourn. nothing ended because nothing officially began. you are standing at the funeral of a hypothetical, and the hypothetical did not even have the courtesy to leave photographs.
that does not make the feeling fake. imagined futures can occupy real space. we arrange decisions around them, furnish them, and begin living beside them. when they disappear, the vacancy is real even if the tenant never moved in.
Photo: Aaron Burden / Wikimedia Commons (CC0) you are allowed to remain in the present tense
i would love to claim that recognizing this habit has cured it. unfortunately, self-awareness is often just anxiety wearing a small employee badge. now i can grieve prematurely while also providing live commentary.
the only useful correction i know is embarrassingly simple: if the thing is still here, let it be here. do not convert every good moment into future evidence that good moments once existed. do not force a person, place, pet, season, or version of yourself to become a memory while it is still trying to have lunch.
and if the future you wanted never arrives, you can mourn it without arguing yourself into court over whether an imaginary event counts as a loss. the feeling already showed up. it has established residency. denying it will not make it return the keys.
grief is not a loyalty program. there are no points for starting early, no discount for suffering efficiently, and no premium tier where you become immune to the ending. we may as well stop trying to beat it to the address.
the thing is here until it is not. this is both the problem and, inconveniently, the whole gift.
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liz lemon remains extremely well-documented
a complete record of the human experience, if the human experience had three coffees, a sandwich, and absolutely no room for feedback. Read more
a complete record of the human experience, if the human experience had three coffees, a sandwich, and absolutely no room for feedback.
Source: YouTube
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no one has ever been more prepared to haunt you than kate bush
kate bush arrived at the windowsill fully formed, wearing a red dress and a practical amount of wind; everyone else has been… Read more
kate bush arrived at the windowsill fully formed, wearing a red dress and a practical amount of wind; everyone else has been trying to catch up since.
Source: YouTube
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arkansas has put the library card on probation
an Arkansas censorship law has turned ordinary library use into a maze of age zones, checkout bans, and criminal-risk management. Read more
i reposted this because the list of new rules at the Craighead County Jonesboro Public Library reads less like library policy and more like terms of supervised release.
minors cannot use the self-checkout kiosks. children under 13 are limited to the children’s collection. teenagers can use the children’s and teen sections, but not the adult collection. nobody under 18 may check out a DVD. minors are also barred from entering or buying anything from the Friends of the Library bookstore.
the state has not technically replaced the library card with an ankle monitor. it has merely arranged the experience so that borrowing a movie, browsing outside your assigned age habitat, or purchasing an old paperback requires adult intervention. freedom has been preserved in the sense that there are still books inside the building.
Craighead County Jonesboro Public Library. Photo: Explore MOR(e) Northeast Arkansas. the threat works before anybody gets arrested
these changes follow the Eighth Circuit’s July 30, 2026, decision allowing Arkansas to enforce Act 372. the law exposes librarians and booksellers to criminal liability for furnishing material deemed “harmful to minors,” and it gives local governing bodies final authority over challenged library material. a federal district judge had blocked the law as unconstitutionally vague and overbroad; the appeals court reversed that judgment.
the Arkansas Times reported on September 3 that libraries were already redesigning ordinary circulation around the possibility that a librarian might be charged. Independence County stopped minors from checking out manga and adult graphic novels. in Pulaski County, the outgoing director of the Central Arkansas Library System urged the board to minimize employees’ exposure to prosecution.
this is the part censorship advocates get to pretend is administrative. nobody has to march through the stacks with a cardboard box labeled FORBIDDEN IDEAS. you threaten the person behind the desk with criminal charges, then let the institution calculate how small it needs to become to feel safe.
the chilling effect is not a side effect. it is the product.
Bookshelves inside the Craighead County Jonesboro Public Library. Photo: Explore MOR(e) Northeast Arkansas. a library is supposed to permit wandering
i understand that libraries organize material by age. a picture book, a young-adult novel, and a tax manual are trying to do different jobs. but a useful library is not a set of sealed departments. it is one of the few places where curiosity is allowed to make an unscheduled turn without first becoming a purchase.
a 12-year-old can wander from mythology into archaeology. a teenager can look up the novel referenced in a movie, read a cookbook, or discover that the adult shelf contains both James Baldwin and fourteen books about fixing a deck. sometimes the great danger is literature. sometimes it is home improvement.
the Craighead County library’s own history says its regional system gives patrons access to more than 164,000 physical items, plus a large digital collection. that is what public infrastructure looks like when it trusts people: abundance, shared access, and room to find something nobody thought to assign you.
Act 372 turns that trust inside out. the child is treated as a liability, the librarian as a potential defendant, and the shelf as evidence waiting for a prosecutor to develop an opinion.
parental rights, except for everyone else’s parents
supporters sell laws like this as parental control, but the practical result is government control applied to every family at once. a parent who wants their teenager to browse the adult collection cannot make that choice through the teenager’s library card. a family that permits DVDs cannot reverse the blanket ban. the state has defended parental authority by preempting it.
EveryLibrary has called for Arkansas to repeal and replace Act 372, arguing that libraries already have collection policies, challenge procedures, and ways for parents to guide their own children. that is the boring answer because boring answers are usually what functional public institutions use: professional standards, due process, and individual families making individual decisions.
the exciting answer is threatening librarians until the self-checkout machine becomes contraband.
the Eighth Circuit opinion explains what the law permits. the policies now appearing around Arkansas show what it produces. the distance between those two documents is where censorship likes to claim it did nothing.
meanwhile, children may continue enjoying the library in the approved biome, during authorized browsing, with an adult nearby to operate the dangerous machinery.
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voter registration has discovered audience targeting
the voter-registration reminder has finally accepted that democracy may occasionally require a patriotic jockstrap. Read more
there are many ways to remind people to check their voter registration. you can make a sober infographic. you can deploy a clipboard. or, as this Tumblr post correctly concludes, you can put the reminder next to a man in a patriotic jockstrap. democracy contains multitudes, apparently.
Image: tim-ee-sis on Tumblr the useful part remains extremely useful. Vote.gov will route you to your state’s registration and status tools. in Alabama, the general election is November 3, 2026, and registration closes during the fourteen days before an election. “i will do it later” is therefore a deadline wearing a fake mustache.
GIF: tim-ee-sis on Tumblr the original post had already collected 190 notes by early Saturday afternoon. this is not a controlled experiment, but it does suggest civic engagement may improve when it briefly acknowledges that voters have bodies, interests, and internet connections.
so, yes: check your Alabama registration, make a plan, and then return to the important national discourse about whether the stars-and-stripes jockstrap is legally business casual.
