rachelmsterling

[rachelmsterling]

[rachelmsterling]

[rachelmsterling]

And what about it

[rachelmsterling]

Honestly it boils down to reparenting yourself & rewiring your own neuronal pathways & telling yourself a firm “stop” when you notice your mind slipping down negative loopholes & being present in the moment & enjoying being mid task rather than waiting for it to end & not thinking of inertia as your baseline and natural way of living

[rachelmsterling]

your fanfiction is valid

[rachelmsterling]

🖤🩶 ASEXUAL AWARENESS WEEK 🤍💜

This Asexual Awareness Week I wanted to highlight some books that I don’t share here as often because I either haven’t read them yet, don’t own a physical copy, or have only very recently acquired a physical copy and most of my posts like this are stacks and flatlays.

So this time we have a graphic! Yay! (I really hate making graphics someone teach me how to choose backgrounds and fonts)

[instagram]

Books featured:

Slide 2 (read and loved):

- Don’t Let the Forest In by CG Drews

- Never Been Kissed by Timothy Janovsky

- The Evolving Truth of Ever-Stronger Will by Maya MacGregor

- A Nobleman’s Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel by KJ Charles

- How You Get the Girl by Anita Kelly

- The Isles of the Gods by Amie Kaufman

- The Siren, the Song and the Spy by Maggie Toluda Hall

- Before I Let Go by Marieke Nijkamp

Slide 3 (tbr):

- City of Strife by Claudie Arsenault

- Here We Go Again by Alison Cochrun

- Fourth World by Lyssa Chiavari

- Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan MacGuire

- The Romantic Agenda by Claire Kann

- Vespertine by Margaret Rogerson

- The Society for Soulless Girls by Laura Steven

- Breeze Spells and Bridegrooms by Sarah Wallace & CO Callahan

[rachelmsterling]

ATTENTION NEW TUMBLR USERS: This website is different from twitter and there are actually four (4) things that every blog needs. Go to the woods and fetch the cow as white as milk, the cape as red as blood, the hair as yellow as corn, the slipper as pure as gold

[rachelmsterling]

Btw you can be intensely critical of the Democratic party and recognize that it is full of aged out of touch moderates who are refusing to meet the urgency of the moment,

and also recognize that voting for Democrats is extremely important because it allows things like the confirmation of Justices and prevents the literal fascist party from gaining more power and that harm reduction is an important end in itself

These things can coexist

Politics is a long game. Being disappointed and angry today does not obviate your responsibility to participate

[rachelmsterling]

[rachelmsterling]

People really say "being forced to participate in someone's kink without consent" to mean seeing a gay dude in public. Please get real

[rachelmsterling]

[rachelmsterling]

Maybe this is the wrong platform to pose this question given the average tumblr user but

Is it just me or did our generation (those of is who are currently 20-30 ish) just not get the opportunity to be young in the 'standard' sense?

Like, everyone I talk to who's over 40 has all their wild stories about their teens and 20s, being young and dumb, and then I talk to my friends and coworkers and classmates, and we just... dont.

[rachelmsterling]

So George RR. Martin is in the news. He's upset that Glasgow WorldCon didn't call him back. What the Guardian and other outlets desperate for a bit of clickbait leave out is the mountain of context to this. So I'm going to give you some.

GRRM has already burned every bridge needed for special treatment. How? With an absolute train wreck of a hosting job at the 2020 WorldCon in which he butchered the names of awardees, wore silly hats as he rambled pointlessly between powerful speeches by actual award winners, and ranted about the good old days name-dropping old pals of his who are unwelcome in writer spaces because of reasons.

Now until not so long ago that wouldn't have mattered. A big old name like George could have just rung up his old pals who run the show at WorldCon, who have been around for decades like him and reminisced over how things were better before "you know", and they'd have done some wrangling to ensure he didn't have to queue up for slots with all the pleb writers (you know, the ones winning awards and hitting best-seller lists today instead of a decade ago).

Except they're all gone now. The old guard have been swept out. Why? Because they fumbled the 2023 WorldCon so hard that their overt corruption and underhanded practices hit international news:

So they got dropped as fast as people good as the Hugo Awards, and WorldCon by extension, faced possibly its biggest ever PR crisis of legitimacy, putting the new Glasgow WorldCon committee in the inevitable position of trying to patch things over.

That means they have to be entirely stainless. Everything needs to be done by the book, the book needs to be open for everyone to read, everything needs to be transparent, no special favours, everyone gets treated as equals.

Including George RR Martin.

Something he, apparently, wasn't able to handle and so went to his blog to have a sulk. Did he intend for it to hit the national papers so he could bully the Glasgow WorldCon organisers with his big sulk whilst they're in the middle of what might be the most stressful WorldCon organising process in its history with its future hanging in the balance?

Maybe not, but he definitely knew that that's what was going to happen.

GRRM's entitlement is the picture of everything wrong with the old guard that the Hugos and WorldCon needed to move on from, yet another reminder of exactly the mentality that made the 2020 hosting job such a disaster.

Writing shouldn't be an industry of celebrity authors throwing their weight around, skipping the line, and trampling new talent under them with a wink and a nudge with the organisers who they're pally with. The Glasgow WorldCon team has enough on its plate without having to also pander to the egos of people who evidently don't care much for the future of the genre.

Good on them for standing their ground. I'm sure it's going to be a fantastic event, and I'm looking forward to what the future of science-fiction and fantasy actually looks like.

[rachelmsterling]

Not to be a debbie downer but Tim Walz was in the military for 24 years, including during the Iraq war. He called the national guard on protestors following the George Floyd murder. He supports Israel. He's approved an oil pipeline across indigenous lands that break treaties.

It's weird to celebrate a man who goes against all leftist values

[rachelmsterling]

Every time I advocate for voting people are like "no you shouldn't vote! Read this literature, it'll totally change the way you view voting!" And every single time it's the same fucking "you shouldn't vote because both parties are exactly the same so it won't make a difference who wins" bullshit wrapped up in some fancy language

[rachelmsterling]

You guys realize this means we ALL have to vote now. No "don't wanna vote biden" excuses now- if we don't vote our rights are going to be taken away.

[rachelmsterling]

We have lived through this before.

People said Gore wasn't good enough, that he was Bland and uninteresting and middle of the road and something had to change. So they voted third party or they didn't vote at all. And the Democratic party didn't wake up, and we got George W Bush and all the absolute hot garbage that came with him.

And they said Hillary Clinton was the wrong candidate, that she was middle of the road at best and conservative for the Democrats at worst, that she was entitled and they were going to vote for a third party or they didn't vote at all or worse yet, they voted for the other candidate as a joke because it's not like those votes change things, you know? And the Democratic party didn't magically wake up, they didn't majorly change, and we are still dealing with the fallout from that.

And that's not only twice in my lifetime, but twice in my voting lifetime. One of the important things you learn in therapy is that you cannot change other people, and you cannot set your expectations based on how you think they ought to react to certain things.

If you are refusing to vote, or voting third-party because of what you think it's going to make someone else do, please reconsider.

If you want to make the liberals or the centrists or whatever you want to call them wake up, you're going to need to do something that hasn't already been done twice in the last 20 years.