#the shut in

[mysteriesofmarcy]

Mystery Monday #28: Is It Canon?

Since today is Halloween, I figured it would be appropriate to talk about the Halloween special.

The Shut-In! is one of those episodes that is what we call "questionably canon." Each of the four stories has its reasons for being considered to have actually happened (as Hop Pop said), and each has its reasons for being considered to have not actually happened.

We'll start with The Shut-In itself. Given that this one consists mostly of everybody staying inside and telling stories, I think it most likely happened. BUT, the idea of a trick-or-treat kind of thing with supplies instead of candy feels a little far-fetched to me, even for this show.

Next, Phone Mo. This one is definitely most likely to be fake. Note that Anne (presumably) didn't know the rules beforehand, so being the one to go first meant she kinda had to make up a story on the spot. Parts of Phone Mo, i.e. the characters and setting, are definitely real -- or at least, based on reality -- but the story itself likely never happened. If I had to guess, I'd say Anne had seen a viral video with an adorable cat licking itself like the video seen in the story shortly before turning 13, but since Anne seems to live on what is supposed to be our world, I doubt the validity of the video coming to life and trapping everyone inside (although, and I just thought of this now, she could have based that part on her own story: she and some other people were trapped in a new world, after looking at something that everybody who has looked at, has mysteriously disappeared. And she only looked at the thing because of peer pressure. So I guess in a way, this story was an allegory (meaning a fictional story, usually in a spiritual or religious context, where every part of it is representative of something else).

Dead End is up next. Since Hop Pop stated the rule that the stories had to have actually happened, I'm going to guess that this he did in fact used to be a chauffeur and that his hair was in fact cut off by one of his customers named Mr. Littlepot. He probably exaggerated the details just a bit, but I say, this story may have actually happened exactly the way Hop Pop describes it. Mr. Littlepot might have been an otherworldly prisoner who somehow escaped, or he may have just been a frog who decided his calling in life was to "take [dying] people where they need to go."

And finally, Skin Deep. This one comes back at the end, which complicates matters. But Sprig said it did happen a few days earlier. And Ivy showing up at the end indicates that she was probably telling the same story to her mom at the time. So if The Shut-In actually happened, then Skin Deep actually happened too. Now, I found pictures online of actual glass frogs.

As you can see, they are translucent and transparent on the bottom. So another point for this story being real.

And let's finish it off by revisiting The Shut-In. Polly turns into a hideous beast after looking at the moon just like the tradition says. But since she is completely back to normal by the next episode, it must be concluded that either the entire episode is noncanon (which I don't want to believe), or else the curse is short-lived (perhaps disappearing as soon as the moon sets the next morning). So I guess that's my conclusion: if the episode is canon, then the curse of the moon is lifted the next morning. In fact that actually makes sense, as everyone seems to know what the curse is, but nobody knows whether it's real: the first frog to look at the moon would have turned into a hideous beast, and their family would have seen them in that state overnight, but when they tried to tell everybody else the next morning, they weren't a hideous beast anymore. And the crowd reacted the same way as Wartwood reacted to Anne and Wally telling them about the Moss Man.

🎃 That's all for this week! Happy Halloween! 🎃

#amphibia #mystery monday #the shut in #happy halloween 🎃 #wow i can't believe this series lasted this long #but i still have a lot more ideas #so stay tuned

[amygdalae]

Me: damn this situation I'm in sure isn't ideal, what am I gonna do about this

Suicidal Ideation Man who lives in my brain: perhaps I have a suggestion ☝️🤓

#shut upppp suicidal ideation man

[bossuets]

"if i was orpheus i would simply not turn around" yes you would. if you were orpheus and you loved eurydice, you would. to love someone is to turn around. to love someone is to look at them. whichever version of the myth — he hears her stumble, he can't hear her at all, he thinks he's been tricked — he turns around because he loves her. that's why it's a tragedy. because he loves her enough to save her. because he loves her so much he can't save her. because he will always, always turn around. "if i was orpheus i would simply —" you wouldn't be orpheus. you wouldn't be brave enough to walk into the underworld and save the person you love. be serious

#'if i was orpheus i would simply' shut the fuck up #anyway #personal post #hit post

[hamletthedane]

So, I follow this “bad commercial interior design” Facebook page and-

#WHO DESIGNED THESE #laugh tag #shut up e #memes

[erros429]

roommate texted this to me……..

#having an absolutely wild time with it this week #dungeon meshi #dunmeshi #delicious in dungeon #marcille donato #laios touden #farcille #erros doesnt know how to shut up #1k #2k #5k #10k #15k #20k #30k

[sleepy-bebby]

#hamster #memes #meme #cute #funny #cute animals #animals #wholesome #funny memes #hamster meme #hamster memes #ninja #dank #dank meme #dank memes #lol #westerners whining in the tags about his enclosure as if I can do anything about it is hilarious. yaaaaawn dgaf shut up

[jonnywaistcoat]

I low-key love the fact that sci-fi has so conditioned us to expect to be hanging out with a bunch of cool space aliens, that legitimate, actual scientists keep proposing the most bizarre, three-blunts-into-the-rotation "theories" to explain the fact we're not.

Some of my favourites include:

Zoo Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they're not talking to us because of the Prime Directive from Star Trek? (Or because they're doing experiments on us???)

Dark Forest Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they all hate us and each other so they're all just waiting with a shotgun pointed at the door, ready to open fire on anything that moves?

Planetarium Theory: What if there's at least one alien with mastery over light and matter that's just making it seem to us that the universe is empty to us as, like, a joke?

Berserker Theory: What if there were loads of aliens, but one of them made infinite killer robots that murdered everyone and are coming for us next?!!

Like, the universe is at least 13,700,000,000 years old and 46,000,000,000 light years big. We have had the ability to transmit and receive signals for, what, 100 years, and our signals have so far travelled 200 light years?

The fact is biological life almost certainly has, does, or will develop elsewhere in the universe, and it's not impossible that a tiny amount of it has, does, or will develop in a way that we would understand as "intelligent". But, like, we're realistically never going to know because of the scale of the things involved.

So I'm proposing my own hypothesis. I call it the "Fool in a Field" hypothesis. It goes like this:

Humanity is a guy standing in the middle of a field at midnight. It's pitch black, he can't move, and he's been standing there for ages. He's just had the thought to swing his arms. He swings one of his arms, once, and does not hit another person. "Oh no!" He says. "Robots have killed them all!"

#shut up fermi you nerd #im not even sure interstellar travel is even possible #at least for any sort ot life we can comprehend #and maybe thats fine

[kazieka]

so I started a new anxiety medication this past week and so far it’s been going very well except that I have extremely vivid dreams and apparently sleep texting. I seem to have sent this at 3am and i have no memory of it

but i am Right

#lindsey shut up #bitch king of angstmar ✌🏻 #I do recall having some lord of the rings related dreams but none of this #lotr #lord of the rings #this post brought to you by buspirone ig #shoutout to GROND

[nyxfaei]

Stuffed animals will see a crack between the bed and the wall and go “is anyone gonna fall into that?” And not wait for an answer

#nyx shut up

[taahko]

every so often im struck by the memory of one of my college professors getting very angry with our class (art history of pompeii 250) because when she excitedly detailed the ingenious roman invention of heated floors in bathhouses via hearths in small crawlspaces, we asked who was tending the fires. she said "oh, slaves i suppose. but that isnt the point". and we said that it actually very much was the point. she had just told us that in roman society there were dozens of people, maybe hundreds, who spent every day of their enslaved lives crawling in cramped, hot, smoky tunnels to light fires to warm pools of water (which they were not allowed to swim in). how could that not be the point?

she wanted us to focus on the art, on the innovation of heated plumbing, on the tiles and decorations of the bathhouses, and all we wanted to do was learn more about the people under the floors. and she didn't know anything more about that. in fact, she said she thought we were focusing too much on superfluous details.

it feels almost hokey to put too fine a point on the idea im getting at here but i will anyway: There are a lot of people who are still under the floors. all these beautiful, convenient, brilliant innovations of modern society (think fast fashion, chatgpt, uber, doordash) are still powered by people working in inhumane, untenable conditions.

the people who run these systems want you to focus on the good - who doesnt love warm water? - but if anything is going to improve or change in our lifetimes, you need to examine these things with an attentive, critical, and empathetic eye. and for fucks sake stop ordering from amazon

#shut up aggie

[emilnikos]

I need non autistic people to realise meltdowns are a real debilitating thing that has a serious effect on your mental and physical health NOWWWWW!!! The way its been trivialized and lessened pisses me the fuck off. It's not a tantrum and it doesn't come from "being too weak-willed" it's painful and it's embarrassing AND MOST OF ALL IT'S INVOLUNTARY!! Don't claim to be an ally to autistic or disabled people and then make fun of people who have meltdowns. Literally get the hell out of my sight

#i can't believe i have to day it but autism /is/ a disablity. its disabling. meltdowns are part of that. #'oh this is a lukewarm take' you dumbshit fucks have been throwing the word neurodivergent and meltdown around so #casually they have both been said at me with the same disdain as a swear word. you guys will accept making fun of autistic people #if someone jn your circle who is 'cool' does it first. at your big ages. shut the hell up

[oflights]

the main problem with this time of year is the irresistible urge to get fully into bed at like 5:34 pm and outside is like yesss, yesss do it, it's what you deserve yesss. like is it depression or is it just november

#it's november obvs #december is not like this!! #today after work i shut the macbook i got into bed and i played that fruit tetris game #while listening to something called 'lofi roman empire' #for 1.5 hours #zero wrinkles in the brain after that completely smooth #and then somehow i cooked dinner

[finch-kid]

i love her

#laura jane grace #twitter #the bird man cant shut up

[vioyume]

Various audio snippets of my childhood that I've collected.

Edit: For all the people who said I needed to add other audios snippets.

#nintendo #webcore #audio #I remember the windows xp shutting down scared me #vio.txt

[hamletthedane]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

#shut up e #long post #Saturday thoughts #this has been in my drafts for a week haha #also this is the heart of why AI art feels so wrong #forget the discussion of copyright and theft etc - even if models were only trained on public domain they would still feel very wrong #because they’re not art. art is the labor of creation #even commercial art and art commissioned by the popes and kings of history: there is humanity in the labor of it #unrelated: I did not know living in the Bronx was now something to brag about. How the fuck do y’all New Yorkers afford this city???

[mirakurutaimu]

saw a poll

#shut up mira