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Is anyone else getting ads on..... How to kill the monkey King?

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it sucks that the backrooms and by extent liminal spaces turned out the way they did in popular culture. i love dreamy places not because they're full of Scary Screatures or whatever but because they're fun and interesting and cool and a perfect place for a girl like me to lay her eggs

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genuinely can’t stress enough if you’re in high school rn and anyone is telling you that’s the best time of your life they are lying. it gets better. hs is arguably the worst. if you can survive that you can survive anything. despite the horrors i know i’m always posting about i swear life is so much better as an adult

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If this isn't overstepping, do you have any advice for not falling into defeatism? You seem good at having hope.

yeah of course let's go

1. Starting off with this one because it’s the most important: you HAVE to remember that genuinely, honestly, relatively, ONLY A SMALL PORTION OF HUMAN BEINGS ARE FREQUENTLY ON THE INTERNET. That means any random statistic you see about people frequenting websites and posting about certain things is ONLY taking into account everyone who's online, and not the literal millions of people who are offline or only online for maybe 1-2 hours a day.

An example: I saw a tweet the other day being upset about how doctors don't take women seriously. The OP would go onto reddit and see a subreddit with countless posts from doctors complaining about their female patients. The OP was very upset and using that source to educate people on this genuinely sadly very real problem. I don't want to invalidate OP's distress, especially because it IS a thing that does happen and should be talked about, but for THIS specific case about the subreddit where the doctors would complain about their female patients, you have to consider: do you think that just because there's a subreddit like this, that means that EVERY SINGLE PRACTISING DOCTOR IN THE ENTIRE WORLD belongs to it and is posting in it? Of course not. Normal, nice doctors probably aren’t posting anything about their jobs online at all. But because you aren’t seeing that, all you see are the bad doctors publicly complaining, and suddenly it starts to skew your thoughts towards all doctors being bad.

And the above example is true of any group of people you can think of. Rudeness and prejudice and stupidity exist everywhere and we shouldn’t ignore that. But the majority of people are good. Most people are kind, and well-meaning, and smart, even if they’re ignorant about certain things. You cannot look at people on the internet being cruel and trick yourself into thinking that because lots of people on the internet are cruel, that means the exact same ratio is real offline too and you should be wary of everybody without actually getting to know them. Most people are good. Humanity is inherently good. People who are upset or mean are just more likely to be loud about it—it doesn’t by ANY means make them the majority.

(Another useful way to think about it that’s stuck with me into my adult years: in one of the HTTYD books, the Romans are the bad guys, and Hiccup says, in response to Fishlegs bitterly saying that Romans suck, “There are probably loads of good Romans, it’s just that all the good ones are sitting at home minding their own business.” And that’s true of literally every group of people imaginable.)

2. This is a given, but seriously. Reduce the amount of time spent on websites where you hear a lot about current events and news.

Finding the balance between "staying informed on current events so I know how to combat the bad things" and "looking away for the sake of my own mental health" can be tricky but the gist of it is make sure that whatever you're reading is useful to you. If it's actually giving you inspiration and strength that drives you to action, then wonderful! But if it's just a lot of people saying the same thing over and over again in a loop and you keep worriedly looking because you're desperate to find at least ONE good thing and end your scrolling on a high note...you have to cut yourself off. If you’re caught in an unproductive anger or despair spiral that’s not actually doing anything except making you upset, then you’re wasting your time. You have to stop and go to something else that makes you happy. If anybody tries to guilt you into continuing, that’s their own problem, not yours. Don’t completely shut the bad parts of the world out, but you have limits. Learn to not cross them.

3. A little bit is better than nothing.

You are only one person, and even if you dedicate your whole life to the activism of your choosing, you will only ever make significant strides in that one thing. You cannot solve global warming, racism, and capitalism all on your own. But you can make small changes in your life that are not worthless at all. Every time you refrain from buying a product that ultimately funds something evil, every time you give five dollars to charity, every time you educate a friend on why them using chatgpt is bad, every time you spend 20 minutes on the exercise bike or encourage someone to make a better life choice or leave one kind comment on a worried person’s post, you’re making the world a better place to be in. You didn’t replant an entire forest, but you’re taking care of a single plant, which is better than tons of people who have no plants at all. You can’t afford to donate much to charity, but you still donate a little bit, which is better than people who don’t donate at all. You only work out 15 minutes every week, but that’s better than people who don’t work out at all. Just because it’s small doesn’t mean it’s unimportant.

Personal anecdote: when I was in my first year of university, I complained frequently that we didn’t have a compost bin in our building, and when I showed up for my second year, WE HAD A NEW COMPOST BIN. It didn’t take much! Just the power of being persistent and annoying!

And, the most important part, which is a mix of all three of the above points:

4. You are not the only person in the world who wants a better future.

There are people ALL OVER THE GLOBE who are doing good things that you don’t see. There are people working to fight plastic usage and pollution and deforestation, to educate others on history and other cultures and forgotten important figures, to entertain and keep people’s spirits up. A man named Tim Wong single-handedly managed to save a butterfly species, because he cared. Another man named Tom Brown has spent his retirement preserving apple varieties, and has managed to save over 1000 of them, because he cared. Fuck, I’m seeing more posts on twitter saying that watching the new Superman movie has made them want to go out of their way to be nicer to people, and that’s just from from watching a movie and being inspired by it. There are people learning to develop ways to clean water & reuse plastic & end world hunger and fight evil politicians for our human rights and create spaces for minorities to feel safe & flourish and teaching other people useful skills and entertaining others to keep their spirits up and hosting charity live streams and maintaining gardens and funding research projects and taking care of the elderly and disabled and rescuing feral cats and making movies with inspiring messages and so many other good things. Nobody is alone, and the majority of people on planet earth want world peace and a happy & healthy planet.

So, to summarize:

1. Only a small portion of human beings are frequently on the internet

2. Dedicating significant time to reading about bad things on the internet with no actual productive goal is a waste of time

3. Doing a little tiny bit of something is better than doing nothing at all

4. The vast overwhelming majority of human beings are good

And some final additions:

Think for yourself and make your own choices, not choices that you are guilted into by self-righteous people online

Keep an open mind and don't be afraid to challenge your own views and change your mind if new perspectives introduce themselves to you

THINK. JUST THINK. USE YOUR BRAIN. QUESTION. DISCERN. ANALYZE. BE KIND TO YOURSELF AND OTHERS.

And most importantly: make a lot of art about it, because it's cathartic AND will inspire people at the same time

thank you for listening

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it kind of annoys me when people are like "Rumi barely knew Jinu at all and yet she was opening up to him instead of her trusted lifelong friends, she's ridiculous and this is so hetero"

just think for like. a second. if you have a secret. a REALLY big secret, that you're deeply insecure about and that you know your trusted lifelong friends are judgmental about. then...very obviously...opening up to a random stranger who you have no connection with, who you won't feel too much of a loss about if the conversation goes wrong...is WAY easier. she's never had a positive experience with a demon before, so he's compelling. he's sympathetic to a part of her that all of her loved ones hate. of course she's going to want to connect with him. why wouldn't she??

also potentially hot take but they weren't even really romantic at all gjhdfk there was definitely some attraction there yeah but the movie didn't feel like it was trying to shove an actual genuine romance in my face at all, just an attraction

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US defaultism is insane yesterday l said on a discord server “it’s winter but I’m not cold. whyyy...” and they responded “dude it’s summer. it’s july” and then proceeded to DOUBLE DOWN when I explained that they were thinking of the wrong hemisphere

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bell hooks mentioned going through a time in her life where she was severely depressed and suicidal and how the only way she got through it was through changing her environment: She surrounded her home with buddhas of all colors, Audre Lorde’s A Litany for Survival facing her as she wakes up, and filling the space she saw everyday with reinforcing objects and meaningful books. She asks herself each day, “What are you going to do today to resist domination?” I also really liked it when she said that in order to move from pain to power, it is crucial to engage in “an active rewriting of our lives.”

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This person wrote a manifesto I ain’t reading all that but this is literally the type of behavior im talking about the idea hobbies all cost money is so removed from reality if you have the time to pick up your phone and write 7 paragraphs on how im victimizing you with my offhanded post you have the time to watch a movie on YouTube with your very same phone instead come on now. How is you freaking out on the internet helping any of these issues

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so many people on the internet somehow think that every single thing needs to be pathologized and it drives me completely insane

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We used to dunk on people asking random users on here questions they could’ve googled but now that every single google search gives you an AI generated response it’s actually better for the environment to just ask a random tumblr user and see what they have to say.

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and my personal favourite attacks of 2025! characters belong to @twinvenus, yolk_xio & dadeetan19, Huuleei (featuring my Cailín), and @lethesbeastie!

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part two of my 2025 artfight attacks! characters belong to dunderVee, @nottodaylogic, Bloothyme, @cutieacefuck, Sakinys, @gourmet-rhapsody, and @coffeecakecafe!