Before the internet, librarians were the gatekeeper of knowledge. For your reading pleasure, the New York Public Library released a cache of queries and conundrums called in from the 1940s to the 1980s.
AU where Maul doesn’t get sent to a trash planet and recovers his sanity much faster so by the time Anakin is twelve he and Obi-Wan have Maul periodically popping up while they’re on missions and trying to kill them.
at one point he actually manages to sneak into the temple, but because it’s a centuries old structure that’s been continuously added to for almost as long as it’s been around, it’s completely impossible to navigate without a map, so he ends up lost inside the temple for weeks. by the time he finds Obi-Wan some poor master has mistaken him for a lost shadow who just got home after years and years and has fed him and bathed him and clothed him in jedi tunics
It turns out that Obi-Wan isn’t even IN the temple, so Maul decides to continue his cover as a jedi until he gets back. By the time Obi-Wan does return, Maul has actually started enjoying his new life and doesn’t want to leave it, so when he runs into Obi-Wan in the hallway, he ignores him. Obi-Wan, who can’t believe that the man walking around in beige and bowing respectfully whenever someone greets him is Maul, decides that it must be a weird coincidence and decides to be perfectly polite and normal about it and then go cry in his room alone.
Maul acts normal and and innocent and waits until he’s SURE he’s in a camera blindspot and no one else is looking, and then he gives Palpatine the BIGGEST shit-eating grin. So now Maul is inadvertently protecting Anakin because Palpatine has to switch priorities from grooming Anakin to killing Maul before he can spill any secrets, and Maul is more or less inflicting long-distance psychological torment on his former master just by existing
and imagine Palpatine weaseling his way into the temple as an excuse to try and work his claws a little deeper into Anakin, and HE bumps into Maul in beige robes with all the respectful bowing and teeth that are showing signs of recovery from working for SithCo which Doesn’t Even Have Dental
I put Vicks on, I get weird dreams about my grandparents old house
I don’t put on Vicks, the dog leaves to sleep elsewhere because of my coughing
Cringe started as a verb describing a physical reaction, i.e.: “I cringe when I see [x].”
Modern slang has turned cringe into an adjective describing anything to which a person might have such a reaction.
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This shift in language is illustrative of a shift in culture.
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For a while there, in the early 2000s, there was this big sex positivity movement and we talked openly about kink and queer sexuality and creating a culture of consent that broke away from traditional conservative ideas of moral respectability.
And now we are in the midst of this giant purity culture backlash, this giant push for rigid conformity all over the internet. Anything that deviates from the norm even remotely is ridiculed.
And this cultural shift is perfectly encapsulated in this singular linguistic shift, this verb becoming a noun.
The Revenge of the Pearl Clutchers
That’s what “cringing” is. It’s pearl clutching.
When the pearl clutchers turned cringe into an adjective, they turned a reaction into an accusation. The pearl clutchers don’t want to take responsibility for their own kneejerk emotions. They want to blame YOU.
They are saying, “My disgust isn’t the fault of my own backwards prejudices. It is YOU who are inherently disgusting. My inability to cope with even the slightest deviation from norm is not the problem here. YOUR refusal to rigidly conform is the problem. I am not the one who is cringing. YOU are the one who is cringe.”
Fuck ‘em.
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Take the word back.
Cringe is not something people are.
It’s something judgmental assholes do.
This. THANK YOU.
Well said.
Your inability to accept the differences of others does not constitute any sort of sheep-like compliance to your cringe-worthy demands on my part.
After months of research and development and market testing and perfecting the first item I feel confident selling online, I have realized… that it is an incredibly niche item that only a specific subset of absolute nerds would want to buy, and I will have to do a ton of explaining the basic idea over and over again before people generally get what it is I’m even selling. RIP me
Long story short: I’m selling embroidery patterns. You stick them on fabric, embroider them, and wash the pattern away to leave your embroidery shining in solitary splendour.
This is basically what my physical therapist had me do for my back problems last year and it helped with the pain so much! Also walk for at least thirty minutes a day, even if it’s just in small chunks throughout the day.
