99thpercentile

[99thpercentile]

my phone isn’t charging even though i plugged her innnnn dramatic ass bitch. YOUR PUSSY IS FILLED! WHAT MORE COULD YOU WANT

[99thpercentile]

I'm not saying that immigration is easy - I know from personal experience that it is not even if you have a strong case and a useful background - but people from the United States in particular seem to treat it like an impossibility to anyone who isn't rich.

And it kinda shows how infrequently they actually think about the circumstances of the people from south of their borders who crossed deserts and often multiple countries to pull it off in the face of even greater threats, hundreds of thousands of them as unaccompanied children.

Poor people immigrate and become refugees all the time even without resources, and if things get really bad it might be best to try to be more like those people and do what you can to save yourself. You have agency. You probably have more options than those traumatized children do. Don't just convince yourself it's all impossible before you at least verify that it actually is impossible.

[99thpercentile]

I am finding out that a lot of things I thought were common knowledge about Christian Fundamentalism are not in fact common knowledge.

Like with the aid freeze, people were like why would they do this? And I was like cause they want churches to be the only option for aid.

And people were shocked. And I was also shocked that this wasn't like...more well known. I grew up with people who were anti-aid because they felt that belonged to the church and made people behave more worldly if they could get it elsewhere. It was so well known it was a debate topic in my Philosophy of Religion course in high school.

I'm just...I'm concerned at how little some groups seem to know about Christian Fundamentalism. I wish I could help translate more.

[99thpercentile]

- P. Califia, "Public Sex"

That was 1986. In some ways it's gotten so much better. In all too many ways it still hits hard.

"Even those of us who are deviants or sex radicals or both can't seem to stop apologizing for the shabby forms our society often forces Eros to assume" is... whoof.

[99thpercentile]

I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success.

Like… if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it’s a “failed” business. If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you’re a “failed” writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it’s a “failed” marriage.

The only acceptable “win condition” is “you keep doing that thing forever”. A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a “real” friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a “phase” - or, alternatively, a “pity” that you don’t do that thing any more. A fandom is “dying” because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things.

I just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good. And it’s okay to be sad that it ended, too. But the idea that anything that ends is automatically less than this hypothetical eternal state of success… I don’t think that’s doing us any good at all.

[99thpercentile]

scantily is basically the most classic way to be clad

[99thpercentile]

fucks me up that if you take every action that Cazador would’ve in Tav’s position, you gain a ton of approval from Astarion. just makes it more tragic that these two would’ve liked each other under different circumstances, but the power dynamic destroyed any chance of that happening.

[99thpercentile]

It's a cliché to say that Tolkien's experiences in WWI affected all aspects of his writing, how he wrote about friendship and grief, how he wrote about desolate blasted landscapes. But I wish someone who knows more about Tolkien's military career could help me understand how Tolkien related to retreats. His description of Faramir keeping his people together on the retreat from Osgiliath is one of the best-written sequences in the trilogy, and hardly anyone remembers it. It's about a desperate retreat, and a leader whose presence, whose strength manages to keep it from turning into a rout. There's something very vivid in the descriptions: don't break formation, don't start running or they'll pick you off one by one, keep together, keep moving, hold all of that fear at bay. Tolkien describes that retreat as genuinely heroic, a superhuman act of will, one that exhausts Faramir almost to death, and Denethor still does not accept it as heroic because it's a retreat. It saved men but it lost territory, therefore in his eyes it's a failure.

Tolkien has strong opinions about heroic retreats, in the Silmarillion he sometimes gives the retreat-through-the-dangerous-wilderness plotline to female characters (Emeldir, Idril), he always writes them with respect. Sometimes, getting out of there and keeping most of your people alive is a great act of valour. I feel like he must have had a personal experience about what it means to retreat, and what it means to hold a retreat together, and what it means to get no thanks for it.

[99thpercentile]

You can only eat 2 foods for the next 2 years (with no health repercussions)

Spin this wheel twice to figure out what they are!

[99thpercentile]

what is THE worst thing you've ever drank. all liquids acceptable. please tell me what it was, bonus points for why

[99thpercentile]

this might come across as anti capitalist but,,,,,, i want to enjoy life

[99thpercentile]

[99thpercentile]

Demons and monsters that torture people because they feed on human suffering are so dumb. People are suffering everywhere my guy go literally any place and take a deep whiff.

[99thpercentile]

man in the mirror

[99thpercentile]

the difference between what I do unmedicated vs on baby non-stimulant adhd meds is stark. wondering now if the real deal could actually turn me into a functioning member of society

[99thpercentile]

i just think it's important to understand that love is not the antithesis of horror in fact it's often the catalyst

[99thpercentile]

Tumblr can never be my main means of engaging in politics and it comes down almost entirely to Tumblr's pathological need to distill The Right Opinion:tm: from any complicated issue.

It's always the most important thing. Not because it helps solve the issue or helps the people impacted, but because The Right Opinion:tm: is a proxy for you, morally, as a person. And every issue needs to be broken into the language that sets the stances of Make You Good or Make You Bad.

And I don't mean this in any generic statement about echo chambers or virtue signaling. Those are separate but related concepts. What I'm talking about is how people are nervous about a topic until one doctrine is crafted which defines the Sports Team Color of our Sports Team, so we can be identified as being on the Us Sports Team, and absolutely not on the Them Sports Team. Because this issue is actually about you and the proxy for you as a person and how people should perceive you so, really, the sooner we figure out the Home Sports Team Colors the sooner you can stop feeling worried.

The moment something new happens is usually the first and last time you'll actually see a range of opinions on it. And some of that is fueled by misinformation! Some in bad faith! When dust settles and clarity is achieved, this helps combat those things, but it's also the moment when the Loudest and most Articulate voices craft the Zeitgeist Opinion and everyone comes to roost around it.

You get people on this site pissed off at AI models that can diagnose cancer from a research paper in 2019 because The Right Opinion is that AI is bad. If you even see a post trying to articulate good uses of AI, well that's someone wearing Packers colors at a Vikings home game, and if you wanna make a point in the "wrong" direction you better be damn articulate about it.

A well-defined set of actions are transphobic. Another set are actually not transphobic, and you'd be transphobic for thinking so. Are you trans and actually your lived experiences differ? Get articulate real fast or shut up. You might be able to eek an exception for yourself, but it's going to require a 10-paragraph post justifying your claim. If you're REALLY good at it though, you might be able to rewrite the Zeitgeist and now anyone who disagrees with you is transphobic. Teams switch uniform styles every now and then, after all.

And it's such a farce because so often it's not actually about the topic at hand. It's about why you should be allowed to be perceived as a good person while toeing outside the fringes of The Right Opinion, why you aren't actually quitting the faith or committing blasphemy or deserving of exile for going off the written word. Or if someone really IS trying to make it about the topic at hand, the ensuing slapfight in the comments needs to be about whether OP has sinned against the covenant.

It's not helpful.