#2 is such a fucking time waster. this is both positive and negative.

[machinavillage]

xenoblade 2 for the reverse unpopular opinion thing!

i cant even be called a hater for this game because i actually like xc2 at this point. its just that the parts i hate cant be overlooked.

my weird positive opinion on it is that i love affinity charts. i even kinda like ursula's, fucked up as that quest is. people rightly dislike 1's sidequests but i like them because i like filling out checklists. i like it when video games give me stupid shit to do that i was going to passively do anyways and then make noises and check off lists for me. so, affinity charts for blades were a cool way to do that i guess. and unlike xenoblade 1, doesnt require i have a spreadsheet open on my laptop.

i also still think 2 has the best ost overall. ive been replaying 2 and i think it has the best map design and is the most engaging to traverse.

at one of my worst moments mentally i spent days grinding love sources to get every blade to S+ affinity so. that's exceedingly stupid. but it seems to have done something for me that prozac or whatever else i was taking wasnt helping with.

[drdemonprince]

Lots of great advice for trans guys looking to get some pole on Grindr to be found in this article by David Davis:

Like honking, blocking on social media has a bad rap. The mainstream take on blocking seems to be that it’s the prerogative of cowards, assholes, and even authoritarians, to the extent that those who disappear without explanation—whether by failing to respond or, more pointedly, by eliminating the opportunity for contact—are seen as antisocial, even pathological. I’m not here to argue about that (although believe me, I have my opinions!). I just want to point out that, like honking, blocking has different meanings across contexts. In fact, it’s naive to insist they are uniformly negative. In some situations, one or both parties understand that blocking is simply a more direct way of communicating desires, drawing boundaries, and granting and taking space. Take the gay hook up app, Grindr: to function well on this platform, you need to block, especially if you’re a fetishized minority. It’s not just trolls, spam, and creeps—it’s also the perfectly inoffensive people that you’re just not interested in (indeed, some users will put in their bio that you should block them in this case). Because Grindr is location-based, you see your grid—that is, the matrix of users in your immediate vicinity—every time you open the app. If you’re mostly opening it at home, that means you see more or less the same people every time, roughly 15 per scroll. If someone around the corner hits you up and you don’t respond, that could mean Not right now or Not ever. If you’re busy but potentially interested, you may just ignore their messages or likes until the stars align. If you know they’re not your type, blocking them saves you both some time. Anyone who’s used apps like Grindr for longer than a minute will know that while rejection doesn’t feel good, it’s part of the playing the game. Without failing to acknowledge the ways that normative standards of attractiveness affect us all, taking a block personally just doesn’t make sense1.

When I used Grindr previously, I avoiding putting FTM in my handle because it drew a preponderance of chaser-types (I enjoy and will fuck chasers2, but they do take more work to weed through), though I was obliged to put a kindergarten-level explanation of my genitals in my bio, since people often read me as transfeminine3. This time around, I started advertising as FTM out of sheer laziness: with my transness in my handle as well as my bio, I get more messages than I can respond to, which means I can pick and choose. This has also put me in the position of needing to block considerably more, which has led me to think more about when and why I do it. After a few years of being an FTM on gay hookup apps, my trigger finger is constantly itching. Within the first few words of an exchange, I can tell how worthwhile a conversation with someone will be. If there is any hint that I will be insulted or annoyed, I’m more likely to block than see it through. This is both good and bad: snap judgments save me time while limiting my range of experiences. I’ll deal with fewer time-wasters, assholes, and rapists, but I’ll also have more homogenous hookups as a result. This transgender hypersensitivity, while admittedly crazy, is the price of my safety and, paradoxically, my mental health (some have more tolerance, some less; your mileage, etc.). It is what it is. I don’t block because someone sends me unprompted nudes, is direct or aggressive, offers to pay me, or misgenders me in a well-intentioned way. In fact, I prefer this sort of interaction, as it shows that the other person recognizes that 1) we are on a gay hookup app for FAGGOTS, 2) attraction both transcends and reinscribes identity, whether or not we think it does, 3) it’s just sex, 4) acknowledging the potential of a financial transaction means they understand that that I understand that my attention is valuable4, and 5) that I am clearly fem and should be approached with the princess treatment.

[keepcopinghoe]

catch up pt.1

quick rundown of what’s been going on with me

ramo is the first guy that i’ve consistently and personally interacted with since about 2018 and definitely the first guy who actually around my age that i’ve formed a relatively close bond with. i think it’s for this reason that i’m so attached to him. he frequently described himself as an incel (ironically tho) and i think his last actually non-paid-for sexual relationship was back in 2017. so i stupidly assumed that i was the only girl in his life that he was actually close with and this delusion i think in many ways also is what build the foundation behind the inexplicable quasi-infatuation that i have now.

 on 06th june he told me about some girl that was part of his i***c*** discord which i already knew he was a part of since ages ago. i asked about her and he said she was from lithuania and that he was pissed off because some other guy was orbiting her which immediately set off alarm bells to me since there’s legit no reason to get pissy that someone else is orbiting a girl unless you like her yourself. he also said some shit to me which i think was unintentionally (or maybe intentionally?) hurtful, about how he could easily afford my prices and that i sell myself way below the market rate (both true but still). i think it’s both these things happening at the same time which particularly stung: ramo orbiting some e-girl who is involved in the same interests and hobbies to a greater extent than i am and also the emphasis that i’m a whore (and a cheap one at that) who no one would ever really consider as a serious dating prospect if they knew anything about my history.

i told him shortly after than i didn’t want to see him for a month or so, making up the excuse that it was because i was gonna be too busy. this is partially true cus i did initially have the plan to work every single day until the date of my breast augmentation/lift surgery which would be 25th june, earning like £700 a day in profit if i worked very hard. that didn’t quite come to fruition because there was some guy who booked with me that left a negative review on UKP which led to a fussilade of criticism from various users about me being a power-tripping time waster who frequently ghosted clients. this is kinda true except the power-tripping part; my timewasting is a direct result of substance abuse problems which is a direct result of whoring myself out to men that i often find unattractive. all in the preceding week (i met ramo on a sunday and this shit happened the following week).

two separate people passive aggressively threatened to send me another negative review over text, i have to provide a discounted rate to two of my regulars due to consistantly missing bookings, someone left me a negative review under my AW profile (which they did through sending a booking request that i didn’t confirm) saying that my service had declined massively over the last few months and that it was like ‘fucking a zombie’ and the final night of working on thursday (10/06), i saw this guy who has followed me under various aliases i’ve had in the past (jade/sana/etc.) and that i last meant at kingston premier inn in like june 2019. would have been a nice blast from the past in some respect but i made a stupid retarded decision to do coke with him - i then sniffed poppers which was retarded as well because poppers are a stimulant and speeds the heart up even further which i didn’t really know at the time. i then got super paranoid that i was gonna have a heart attack and kept telling the client in question to ensure that he call an ambulance if i collapsed, which i’m sure really got him in the mood. his name was james and i stupidly told him my real name. he couldn’t come and i felt like shit because i knew he didn’t enjoy himself - he told me in his mind that he had kind of ‘built’ the meeting up and i suppose it must have fallen massively short of his expectations. it is what it is.

i couldn’t sleep really at all due to the coke. i had several meetings arranged for the next day on friday with regulars all of which i cancelled. i just couldn’t continue on with the same routine of waking up in the morning feeling disgusting because i keep eating junk food delivery, doing an enema, getting drunk and just getting fucked until bedtime even though it was really good money.

i fucked around and went to chinatown on saturday evening and was feeling really happy and relieved about not having to work. i’ve figured that i can just make money after my surgeries and start again under a new profile where i don’t have any negative reviews attached to it and maybe rent out an actual apartment on a monthly basis, since it’d be cheaper than air BnB and i can set things up the way i want. i ate sweet and sour fish and egg fried rice, it was taste (ramo always says that lol).

idk what compelled me to do it but on 14th june, i looked through ramo’s likes on twitter. i think it was because i recalled seeing an obvious girl account in his likes previously - this is something i didn’t really think about at all previously but with the new information he had told me the sunday before, i ended up browsing her account which kind of led to a personal crisis. i found out fairly quickly that this girl was the same one he had referred to on discord (m** on discord, j**** on twitter) simply because there were screencaps on her media referring to the same discord and she was definitely from lithuania. i always assumed that women in these circles were lame and bland tradthots who lacked any kind of constitution beyond mindless pandering to irony poisoned scrotes and genuinely retarded wignats but i was suprised at how immediately endearing this girl appeared even to me, through the internet and as someone i have every reason to feel petty resentment towards.

her shitposts were funny and while she is edgy, she has an underlying sweet and kind disposition. her art is shit but cool in its own scrambled way. she’s also apparently only 16 so it’s understandable - i was a lot more cringe at her age and just as shit at art.

the feeling of inadequacy was overwhelming since in addition to being an actual whore, i’m super cringe, lame and normie compared to her. it made completely sense that ramo would orbit a girl like this and i’ve since completely re-evaluated my position and meaning in his life. it’s a good thing that my cope of feelings of intense inadequacy is to launch myself into a phase of hyper-productivity - i kept practicing drawing (apeing her in a way ig since i recently had kind of given up on drawing), fasting, reading, etc. to try and overcome how worthless and self-loathing i felt at being the unwitting basis of comparison to a young girl who was better than me in every conceivable manner. i even listened to msg 3.

i was in so much pain over this that i couldn’t listen to songs which reminded me of ramo (any i****c*** but specifically drug approved and also temptation) and when i did, i just felt anger at my position and a weird resentment towards him. worth mentioning than ramo had sent me a weird bootycall kind of text sometime before then which came across as really crash, so that made me feel even more devalued. 

this is already super long so i’m gonna follow up with a pt. 2 later or maybe edit.

[thetigershymn]

The Way Things Are Gonna Be From Now On (And Why I’m Back And Shit)

Part Two: The Way Things Are Gonna Be From Now On

(a repost)

Sit your asses down, kids, we gotta have a talk.

See, I can’t talk about how this shit is gonna roll without talking about why I left Tumblr to begin with.

Plot fucking twist: turns out you fucks are the maladjusted ones and I’m the mature adult. I fucking know, right? Blew my mind too.

Basically, shit started to get good for me, right? You know, you read part one. You know how that went down. Islands and shit. Anyway, part of that was like, a fuuuuuuuuuckton of high grade triple-A-plus primetime therapy. Fucking years of it. I’m a model citizen now. I’m the dependable one. No shit, someone told me that a while back, I’m the dependable one. Fucking times sure have changed.

I kid. Anyway. At a certain point in the evolution of every hot mess, there comes a knife’s edge moment. Things coalesce, and the realization is had that two choices lay before you. You can seize recovery with both hands – that phrase has deeply symbolic and vital personal meaning for me, it’s literally my name – and you can decide to GROW THE FUCK UP, stop being a giant pissbaby crying about how shit a hand life dealt you, and stand up and do something to actually fix your life instead of just complaining about how unfair your situation is. Or you can wallow in your illness for the rest of eternity, using it as an excuse, and embracing misery because it’s the only thing that makes you feel special. 

I reached that moment, through Ares. And I decided that I was NOT, in fact, addicted to being unhappy, and I DID, in fact, want to be not-unhappy, and I WAS, in fact, willing to put in the work to make that happen. And lo and behold, it started to happen. Wonders of modern medicine. Science is amazing. 

But then something else started to happen, too. Something I hadn’t planned for. I saw the toxicity leave my psychology, I saw the scar tissue across my psyche healing over and fading away, I felt Actual Human Joy Emotion, and then I looked around….and I saw everyone around me still surrounded by that black miasmic soulsucking cloud of misery that I was slowly crawling away from. I saw my enemies for what they were: meaningless dumbasses caught up in their own fucked up shit who had no real impact on my life. I saw my friends gathered around spending all their days stagnating in their own filth, blind to it as they preened about their superiority to all the lesser beings around them. I saw my loved ones still clinging to that deepseated addiction to being unhappy that I was trying so hard to dig out of my own heart. Things around me crystallized, I saw my surroundings more clearly than I had in years, and I realized I was just…..tired. So, so tired. I just didn’t care. About any of it. And I didn’t have time for it. Things were taking off for me for the first time in my entire life, and I just didn’t have time for anyone around me who was content to stand still.

So I left them behind. I left them behind in person, I left them behind over the phone, I left them behind online. Friends, significant other, family, acquaintances, whoever. Whereever I saw that happening in my life, I just…let them go.

I’ll go ahead and give you a moment to be shocked that there’s a lot of useless toxicity on tumblr. Go on, I’ll wait. 

But Solo!! You’re on Tumblr RIGHT NOW!! The misery cloud will swoop in and eat your soul again!!!!!!

Nah, bro, it won’t. We ain’t playing that game again. 

So here’s the new laws of the fucking land. These aren’t for you to follow, mind you. They’re for me to follow. You’ll notice some recurring themes.

1. None of this matters. 

Literally none of this. Tumblr is not and has never been the real world. I knew that back then, too, but I’m done being fucking quiet about this fact. All y’all? You stop existing when I walk away from the computer. Y’all bask and wallow in your complex codes of moral purity that only exist on tumblr, your shoulds and shouldn’ts, your shunnings, your manufactured obligations, whatever. I don’t care. I literally….I don’t care. Don’t like me, go away. Don’t like my blog, don’t follow it. Don’t like what I said, don’t read it. I’m not answerable to you, and I don’t care about trying to deduce the delicate nuances of your subculture’s societal mores and taboos, and if I anger your little internet godlings by crossing the wrong one, I don’t care about that either.

2. We aren’t friends.

We can be friendly, sure. I’m a friendly person, ask anyone. Well…maybe not anyone. But we can be friendly. We can be fun internet buddies, even. But…you don’t know me. I don’t know you. There’s a whole wide life out there I have that you will never see. Y’all need to be better about remembering that than y’all were last time, because I’m done feeling bad about leaving one of y’all behind if you don’t suit my life.

3. I don’t really care about co-religionists, honestly.

I could be the only hellenic polytheist on the planet for all I care. I could be the only Ares dedicant. It’s nice to compare notes and all, or chat, or whatever, and I’m more than willing to help someone out or give some advice or share some experience. I’ve been around for a while. But you, none of you, literally not a one of you is my priority, either in life or in this blog. My religion is about the gods, and one god especially. My religion is not about community. So…..yeah man, I’ll be helpful, sure, happy to be so. But I’m not obligated to do fucking ANYTHING for you I don’t want to, and I’m not answerable to what you think I should do or be or say as a hellenic polytheist or as a pagan. I’m not your fucking mentor and you’re not my fucking priest.

4. Blah, blah, blah.

Let me be really clear about this, because this is the part people are going to really, really struggle with. If it’s from before the posting of this fucking post, February 23, 2020, I don’t fucking want to hear about it. I don’t owe you shit, I’m not explaining shit, I’m not responding to shit, I’m not justifying shit, nothing. Boohoohoo I’m problematic because four years ago I called someone whose name I’ve probably (definitely) forgotten a moron and it hurt their feelings and now they piss into a jar with my name on it and call it a hex or whatever. Do tumblr witches still do the pee jar thing? I don’t remember. Whatever. I don’t care what wrong you’ve decided I committed, I don’t care even if I was actually wrong. I don’t care if something I say now contrasts with something I said three years ago so I’m a hypocrite or whatever. I don’t care whether you think people can change. I don’t care even if I haven’t changed. I’m not putting up with it if it’s from before me coming back to tumblr. I’m just going to laugh at you and hopscotch my ass away. Get over it, yo. So….I’m not going to be going through and purging old posts on my old blog, I’m not going to be ~hiding the evidence~ or whatever the fuck you want to accuse me of. I’m just not going to humor your dumb ancient bullshit. Sucks to be you, chick from four years ago who’s still holding a grudge against me because I made fun of her.

5. I’m not here to waste my time.

Those of you who know me offline know so very well how SHEER FUCKING INFAMOUS I am for walking away from conversations midthought. We’ll be talking, I’ll lose interest, and hey, that’s it, I’m done. No goodbye, no winding down the conversation, nope. We’re done, you’ve lost me. Guess what, not only am I not going to correct that behavior, we’re fucking porting that shit to Tumblr. I’m done with time wasters. I’m done with conversations I don’t want to be a part of. I’m done with arguments that serve no tangible need in my life. Don’t fucking @ me with your bullshit, or your drama, or your petty dumb shit. Because I am definitely, definitely sitting there on the other end of that conversation doing a cost-benefit analysis of what I think will be the possible positive outcome of interacting with you vs the possible negative outcome, and if you fail that assessment, I ain’t wasting my time on whatever you’re bitching at me about.

6. I actually really do hate Tumblr.

Gone are the days of lol fun tumblr meme bro and the ages of ooh cool fandom gifset my dude. I hate this fucking site on a fucking gut level and I don’t like to be here. The only reason I’m back is because I think I can use it for my ~pet project~. Which means…..yep. This is finally, finally a religion-only blog.