pawthorn

[pawthorn]

Do you wanna come over to my house and play primary sources

[pawthorn]

I am begging people to please stop using alt text for author's notes and tag commentary. If you're so concerned that people don't want to see what you have to say, don't force your bullshit on people who use accesibility aids. And if you do want people to see it, put it in the tags or the post itself where most people will actually be able to see it.

These idiots have taken an accesibility feature and somehow managed to find a way to make posts less accesibile to everyone, both those of us who do and do not use the feature.

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[pawthorn]

Can I please just sit on the edge of a crescent moon like once in my life

[pawthorn]

more and more these days i notice people who lead lives of abject cultural and artistic incuriosity, who, when challenged with the reality that certain properties and artists are not deeply obscure and accessible only to ivory-tower academics but actually are incredibly popular and enduring - such as the odyssey and john waters, to name two examples i've seen create dust-ups in the last few days - when they're told that, no, a lot of us do actually know who john waters is, a lot of us have read the odyssey in high school english class, etc., they lash out and insist that you must either be lying or beyond pretentious. and i have all kinds of theories as to what has led to this phenomenon but all i can say in response to all of them is GET A GRIP

[pawthorn]

Hey just a reminder that thought crime doesn’t exist and pretending to have empathy is just as good as having it! You can be the world’s biggest dickhead in the privacy of your own mind and as long as you’re outwardly kind it literally Does Not Matter

i actually really needed to hear this. love this outlook, thank you.

[pawthorn]

fine, i’ll say it. raspberry is everything strawberry wishes it was but strawberries get the spotlight for being cute

[pawthorn]

i feel like ppl who are against kids transitioning don’t understand the degree to which pediatrics are fine with medical intervention for kids. like really? this is where you draw the line?

[pawthorn]

no such thing as too much love. or too much garlic

[pawthorn]

Recently discovered, fully by accident, that the trick to feeling like you have more time in the day is to actually do shit with the time that's there, which seems fake and wrong and it's frankly infuriating that it works >:|

[pawthorn]

i dont care about validity i care about my civil rights

[pawthorn]

Reminder:

[pawthorn]

My boyfriend has really vivid, elaborate dreams. He’ll often wake up and talk about some grand narrative- travel, exploration, politics, performances. I’ve always been a little jealous, he can hold really good plots together for them sometimes.

But anyway, this does have a downside; vivid, elaborate dreams make for vivid, elaborate nightmares. I can usually tell when it’s one of those nights, since he grinds his teeth pretty badly.

I was never quite sure what to do when I knew he was having a bad time of it, though the grinding alone was enough to worry me and push me towards intervening. I used to just shake him gently, hope to rouse him just enough to reset the dream or something, but it wasn’t too effective and anyway waking him up all the time isn’t good for rest.

I’m rather proud of the strategy I eventually settled on: gently, so as not to wake him up, I’d lay one arm across his hands, wrapping his fingers around me so that he was holding on. Nightmares being nightmares, I can usually count on a pretty tight grip when this happens.

It may seem a little odd, but consider that holding on to something with both hands is typically a very agentic frame of mind. We hold on to things that give us power, in one way or another, and possessing objects often makes us feel powerful in some respects. That has consequences, even for a dreaming mind.

I knew it was working when he woke up rather mystified from one such dream, and told me that he’d been running through the caverns of some dungeon or cave system, pursued by monsters, but then all of a sudden he was holding a giant anime sword and fought them off instead. So I got to be a sword for him that night, I was delighted.

I don’t usually get to know exactly what happened, since even for a very vivid dreamer like Ritter, nine tenths of these things get forgotten. But I know I’ve been things like door handles, steering wheels, stuff like that. And even when I don’t know what I am to him, he doesn’t grind his teeth nearly as much- the sleep is deeper and more peaceful, so I get plenty of feedback that it’s working.

It’s such a perfect encapsulation of love in microcosm, isn’t it? No matter how much you mean to them, and how much they mean to you, the gap between two conscious lives is fundamentally separating you. But fundamental does not mean insurmountable. There’s this whole world in him, full of dreams and perspectives that I’ll never truly experience. But I will be a part of those worlds all the same, finding little ways here and there to make sure that the dreams of me make him a better, stronger, and happier person.

Or at least, so one hopes. It’s a difficult challenge, and things often go awry. But usually you get at least a little lucky.

[pawthorn]

now say it with me: authors/artists dont owe you moral purity. an author/artist job is not to hold you by the hand & tell you exactly what is Good™ & what is Bad™. you should be able to think for yourself

[pawthorn]

Ever since I was a little girl I’ve loved information

[pawthorn]

sucks so bad when a character you love is heavily infantilized. that is a grown man he knows what a cigarette is. intimately

[pawthorn]

Rewatching Fantasy High and remembering that one of my favorite things about Brennan as a DM is that he consistently rewards kindness. Show some empathy to that random werewolf? You get a trusted mentor. Save that kid who was just trying to kill you? Lifelong friend. Rescue your evil sister? Redemption and shared healing. The final fight of Starstruck is full of people who showed up to help because, at some point, a character chose to be kind when they didn't have to. Even in brutal universes, kindness is harder to give, but it's still possible and still pays off in material ways. I love it.

[pawthorn]

leitmotifs never get old to me like holy shit dude there’s this melody that corresponds to this one guy and if you hear the melody it means the guy is there. holy shit. and sometimes it refers to ideas too not just guys. has anyone heard about this