#NOW OF COURSE…. WE MAY NEVER KNOW.

[glitchkoi]

So bc my brain is rotting and I’m rewatching inside job around the clock rn cuz I must consume it constantly;

I’m going through the first season finale rn and I truly think that, maybe, the plan was to maybe have Ron eventually remember Reagan again and we would at least see him again somehow. Through out the finale Reagan’s memories glitch and warp around what was altered by Rand’s technology. Of course a dive into her consciousness was what was needed for her to remember what she was forced to forget, I feel like that the way each season has in some way ended with themes of the past and the illusion of memories him remembering SOMETHING isn’t completely out of the question. While of course Rand’s technology was different from Ron’s, I also think it would be dismissive to also ignore the amount that wiping people’s memories affected Ron’s mental state. By forgetting everything he won’t remember that, but considering who was working on the show for the amount of setting up that was done for it to not mean anything.

[ichthyorelationships]

an idea i invite anyone else to write about / run with lol....

the premise that The Change gets all messed up for alberto, say it's something that can happen from stress, &/or happens rarely and you just have to wait for it to resolve itself....used as some parallel to struggling through some emotional turbulence / upheaval / questioning / Realizing Things, etc etc

[goldkirk]

I'm so proud of myself about finances in the past couple months. I still struggle with money but I did enough meditation and journaling and practicing about it to make myself able to actually face my loans and credit cards and savings and bills and start really truly organizing and addressing them for the first time in years instead of just flying by the seat of my pants.

Like. This is a huge deal for me. I've felt like I'm in deadly danger every time I've tried to think about money for years and years. I'm finally able to look it in the face and stare it down and start to organize and plan on purpose instead of just keeping up with the minimum to stay afloat. I'm so proud of myself.

It's still a refrain of "GUILT (funny link)" every time I think about money but I'm able to actually make spreadsheets and face the numbers and monthly tracking again, and even make a new full budget which I haven't been able to do in ages.

still feel guilt, overwhelm, and helplessness, but no longer feel as much deep elemental shame and terror. that's progress baby

[unopenablebox]

look. most people on tumblr, like most people everywhere, are just kind of innumerate, at least in slightly unexpected cases theyre asked to discuss on polls. they can't demonstrate an understanding of probability and they also don't understand compound interest. this is bad, but we can't fix it by explaining on the polls at length why they are wrong, because people on tumblr, in a specific manner but also still pretty much like people everywhere, think you are a fun-ruining evil stemlord who automatically loses the argument and should be put to death as the oppressor if you try to explain math to them

[comradecowplant]

*sniffle* well, that's that then. voyager has made it back to the alpha quadrant (albeit i'm not the biggest fan of the "timey whimey antics save the day" means utilized but i've seen similar plots play out far worse so i'll accept it with minimal brow furrowing), my mind & heart are full with a new sci-fi obsession, and while i know i said i'm diving into TNG asap, i do think my little ticker needs a minute to process & say goodbye to the star fleet captain who-- no matter how good picard/other captains i can't wait to meet are-- will now forever be My Captain(tm), and her intrepid crew (i'll even miss the doctor!) of the U.S.S. Voyager o7

[sneez]

various fairfaxes and a drawing from my english civil wars hiking au which i never posted :-) [id under cut]

[image description:

the first image is a digital drawing of a group of men on a light brown background. they are all wearing hiking-appropriate clothing. from left to right: a young man swinging from a tree; arrows pointing at him read ‘weirdly passionate about hiking’ and ‘like 15′. a man leaning against a tree; arrows read ‘grumpy’ and ‘only here for family bonding with father-in-law’. a man with a cane and one arm in a sling, leaning over to read a map; arrows read ‘has injured himself on every hike so far’ and ‘designated driver’. a man reading a map with a serious expression; arrows read ‘annoyed about everything except hiking and sometimes also hiking’ and ‘only one who can read a map’. a man with his hands on his hips looking at the viewer; arrows read ‘arranges hikes and then doesn’t go on them’ and ‘good at arguing’.

the second image is a collection of four digital drawings of thomas fairfax, a man with long dark hair, a moustache, and a beard. he is wearing seventeenth-century clothing. one is a full-body coloured drawing of him sitting in a chair facing away from the viewer with his legs folded and his hat on his knee. the other three are uncoloured: two are headshots of him as a young man and an older man, and the third shows him sitting at a table reading a piece of paper with an expression of concentration.

the third image is a coloured digital portrait of thomas fairfax as an older man. he is clean-shaven and has long dark hair and a scar across his cheek. he is wearing a dark doublet and a large white falling band, and is looking to the left of the image with a serious expression.

end image description.]

[simgerale]

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN ; 1/3

TRANSCRIPT:

Some Nights Ago...

magdalena: [whispering] Your highness, why on earth did you drag me out here at this hour?

luca: Well, your majesty, I was laying in my bed, deep in thought—

m: Of course.

l: —when I realized that I never got a dance with you at your ball.

m: And?

l: And I plan on remedying that. May I have this dance, fair lady? ...Please?

m: …[lets out a lengthy sigh] Oh, alright.

. . .

m: Speaking of the ball… Will you finally admit how you recognized me?

l: Simple—the mark on your neck. I am the one who gave it to you.

m: What mark?! You gave me no such thing! I would surely remember—

l: [grins] The scar, your majesty.

m: Oh.

l: When we were children, the last summer before the war, we visited your family. Here, at this castle.

m: Yes… I remember now. You were quite the nuisance, even at that age.

l: And you were quite the prissy little girl.

m: [furrows brows] Touché.

l: Still, I developed a crush the moment you looked me in the eyes. I tried to impress you, of course, which only led to you liking me even less. So I found a dusty sword to show off my sparring skills.

m: [gasps lightly] It was you!

l: Indeed. There I was, practicing in the maze, and then there you were, skipping past my hedge.

m: You could have killed me!

l: I could have, and that is why I dropped the sword and ran. Luckily for me, all I did was cut your hair and a small section of the back of your neck.

m: …I was distraught over losing my long hair, you know.

l: But was it not impressive that it was a clean cut?

m: Luca!

l: [snickering]

[blujayonthewing]

reflecting on how all of my other DMs have gone above and beyond to lovingly weave my and my friends' backstory elements into the larger worldbuilding of the campaign by contrast to all of the ways Elyss' DM has gone out of his way to suppress or excise any influences her family may have ever had on anything and I'm genuinely near tears over it

[systemofshadow]

any other systems / collectives / etc have alters / facets / headmates / etc who come out literally Just to do a bit. like the commitment to the bit is what they're here for

[trial3]

funnily enough i think moreso than distasteful jokes or willful misinterpretations what really bothers me when it comes to representations of Her are people not picking up on the fact that shes a freak alt girl

[farmergilesofham]

I've heard a good deal about how ADHD makes it hard to regulate muscle tension the way a "normal" person would, and I've never really thought too hard about that until literally today, as I intentionally relaxed muscles which have been tensed since before I knew how to speak this language, and took a breath twice as deep as any I ever remember taking.

My shoulders are a different shape. They always felt the wrong shape, and tried as I might with pinning them back like I'd been haphazardly instructed, all I could achieve was a weird caricature of healthy posture. And now suddenly the muscle and fat, which has been a daily trigger for persistent, low-level dysmorphia for years, looks... right.

Why

[unproduciblesmackdown]

mused on some thesis about how billions uses Indignity to illustrate that something someone does has failed / gone wrong in one way or another, and how the way this punishment is an Emotional one means that it can't land if the character just doesn't Feel that punished by it, or at least doesn't like attribute the supposed failure to something inherent enough to them to particularly stew on it, see for example people heightening/escalating their efforts to embarass someone if even that person doesn't Seem to sufficiently externally react in embarassment. winston able to truck along while (a) consciously crafting or maintaining some persona, of eternal and irrefutable dignity or whatever else is associated with "merit"/status, isn't much of a priority, when to him his skills speak for themself even though to others this is about their own merit in recognizing independently if winston's skills Happen to have use, and putting him down if he tries to speak to that anyways, and (b) he's also just able to move along from L's handed to him, whether he thinks it was warranted (like that he'll accept it doesn't count if he only thought it but didn't say it) or not (why can't you count to loyalty), when even if this resilience To How Others Treat Him isn't exactly peak realistic, that he thinks of himself in such a way that he doesn't need to be striving for some paramount official status, or think he's defined by never failing or indeed never possibly able to be seen within a "wow undignified / embarassing" framework so long as this winningness is recognized, or so long as anything is anything, is sure feasible enough.

but anyways thought about it like this thesis is just "i am cringe but i am free" like yeah that works

[sternbilder]

ok so today I had one of the most fascinating and enlightening discussions maybe of my life and I need to share bc it blew my MIND (warning: long)

here's the context. there is a friend I have. they are a pretty good friend of mine that I've known for many years now and I appreciate them as a person very much. lately I have noticed that they've been texting me fairly frequently. which, from my point of view, is once every couple of days. not because they had something specific to say, but just saying hello or asking how my day was.

I'm sure this was well-intentioned, but this was starting to get a tiny bit grating for me. we just met up in person literally two days ago! and you had texted me not long before that, too! nothing new has happened since then! my day has been quite boring, actually! I thought, in my mind, as I swiped away the notification—and immediately felt like an awful friend.

I knew from past experience that responding to the message would invite an immediate and not easily escapable conversation that, due to my poor multitasking skills, would distract me from work or require me to context switch away from whatever else it was I was doing at the moment—cooking, doing chores, watching TV—and worse, amount to little more than idle chit-chat about the same boring quotidian complaints as usual. I am not one of those people who thinks they're above small talk or don't see its social value, but I found myself thinking, am I the one who is being not normal here in not enjoying having this specific kind of interaction MULTIPLE times a week with the SAME person?

so recently, I've been finding myself routinely avoiding opening this particular friend's messages for fear of hurting their feelings if they saw that I had left them on read for a prolonged period of time. I had even gone so far as to avoid posting in a group chat in which we're both participants so that they don't realize that I have, in fact, been online, just not responding to them, specifically. my hope was that after enough slow responses, this friend would eventually get the hint and give up on trying to maintain a steady steam of conversation, but somehow this has not worked so far.

this was starting to weigh on my conscience. I realized that I will have to eventually fight my conflict-avoidant tendencies and just confront this friend directly, for the sake of both my sanity and our friendship. but how to do this gently? tactfully? without implying that I don't value their friendship or that I perceive them as needy or annoying? that was the tricky question. because I know that my friend isn't doing anything wrong! if anything it is probably me that is weird and antisocial and I probably just need to work on my social skills!

but not wanting to feel like a total asshole and hoping to go in with an informed and reasonable mindset (knowing full well that my understanding of social norms isn't always the keenest), I asked a different group chat for their opinion, hoping to gain some perspective on what boundaries they generally considered normal and acceptable to exercise. I phrased my question thusly:

how many friends* would you say you have where you text on a regular basis (say, multiple times a week) 1:1 just to say hi, about nothing in particular *explicitly a friend, not a family member or SO

y'all. the responses were eye-opening.

there were four people who participated in this discussion, all four of whom were in different camps and had wildly different experiences:

0, and assumed most others were the same

0, but assumed most others were not the same

multiple, and assumed most others were the same

multiple, but assumed most others were not the same

1 was me; in retrospect, I am realizing that because I had assumed that these kinds of interactions were not typical, I had interpreted my friend's gesture as something much more significant than it probably was in their mind, which is to say something that they just happen to do with everyone they know and like—which created a sort of pressure in my mind not to let them down and caused a sense of intense anxiety when I found myself struggling to reciprocate. I am absolutely floored at the revelation that it is apparently normal and common for people to have MULTIPLE friends (not even partners!!! or family!!!) that they are talking to on a constant ongoing basis at any given time, and at the possibility that I was treating my friend's feelings with kid gloves when it REALLY wasn't that hashtag deep for them.

2 clarified that they never initiate these kinds of chats, but when others initiate with them, they're fairly comfortable with simply letting these kinds of pings go unanswered, assuming the other person will just move on to someone else without taking it personally.

3 confessed to me that they once tried to do something similar with me, and eventually gave up, but had felt a bit hurt and rejected at my lack of enthusiasm, because they assumed that I was doing this with other people, just not them specifically. they sympathized very strongly with my friend.

4 also recalled that they had at one point tried something similar with me, but sort of got that I wasn't one of those people who would be receptive to this style of communication and wasn't particularly bothered by this, agreeing with 2 that the expectation is not that the recipient HAS to respond, and that my friend should probably pay closer attention to the face-saving social cues I was sending by not responding or responding slowly.

but yeah, the takeaway from this conversation is that people's preferences and experiences and expectations when it comes to digital communication are WILDLY varied, and because both communication technology and the social conventions surrounding them are changing CONSTANTLY (just a few examples: are read receipts good or bad? what about typing indicators? online status? are emoji reacts or gifs/stickers an acceptable substitute for an actual reply? group chats vs. 1:1 DMs? synchronicity and formality of various communication methods like email and chat and video? are phone calls are still socially acceptable?) there are either no agreed-on norms or different camps of people have vastly different understandings of what the norms are

among the other highlights/a-ha moments of this discussion:

Friend 4 asked another friend who is even MORE extraverted than they are what their # was and they reported somewhere in the ballpark of 20-40 people in any given week which is absolutely buckwild to me (importantly, all four of us in the original group happen to be software engineers, a class of people notorious for their lack of sociability, so I have no confidence that I have captured a representative sample size even within this particular group—the numbers both 3 and 4 gave were still both in the single digits, though they are definitely the warmest and friendliest of the bunch)

I realized that one difference between me and 3/4 was that we fulfill our social needs quite differently? specifically, I mostly connect with friends over group chats, of which I have a handful that are quite chatty and at least one or two that I'm actively posting in on any given day. I also typically have at least one, often multiple, real-life social plans every week! I am, in fact, very satisfied with my social life, to the point where it is almost maxing out my social quota (especially recently now that I've started dating someone)! but anyway—I find group chats to be my ideal form of day-to-day communication because there's less urgency and pressure for any individual person to contribute if they're not feeling up for it, and ALSO in the case of group chats where at least one member is a straight man (which is the majority of them for me, and I call out straight men only because they are the only demographic I have historically had this issue with) there is less room for platonic interactions to be undesirably misinterpreted as romantic

3/4 expressed that they prefer 1:1 conversations because they feel more personal and they can be more vulnerable about sensitive topics, which I would generally agree with—though in several of my group chats, I personally do feel comfortable enough with all the members to share things about myself with the entire group just by virtue of having known everyone for a long time and having built group camaraderie, but they seemed to not be comfortable with this without having previously established a consistent 1:1 pattern of day-to-day communication (or maybe they meant they were uncomfortable with the group forum itself, even if they were cool with sharing with everyone individually)?

they also expressed that for them, frequent unsolicited checkins and 1:1 attention from a friend would feel exciting/flattering/validating for them, whereas for me it would feel overwhelming, especially if we weren't THAT close

I do use 1:1 DMs also, but for a very different set of use cases: 1) if I haven't caught up with someone in a while (read: weeks or months), in which case we'll often just not text super long and make plans to call or meet in person instead, or 2) if I have something specific to say, like "here's this meme/song/piece of news I think you'd like to see" or "I need advice on X" or "guess what happened that made me think of you" or "I heard X happened, are you OK?"

I found that whereas I have a very clear distinction between communication preferences with a friend (someone I talk to on a regular basis but don't have a constant line of individual communication with) vs. a significant other (more or less willing to do this, unless they preferred not to), such a boundary between a platonic and romantic relationship does NOT exist for all people which boggled my mind

but yes anyway. I am learning so much about the way people view socializing in the digital age and I am so curious to know more and I kind of wish more people talked about this more openly (specifically among friends! because in my experience this is something that is fairly common to sort out explicitly in a romantic context) because I think this is probably the kind of thing that no one talks about because people are either afraid of potentially hurting feelings or everyone is just kind of assuming by default that their takes are universal without realizing that no actually, many people have strong opinions on this that are the polar opposite of theirs

but my gut feeling is that there is a lot of completely unnecessary friction that could just be resolved if only we could agree that it's cool to be more upfront about what our communication preferences are without worrying about that being taken extremely personally by the other party? bc idk, every single person I talked to about this today was like holy shit this was a whole fucking revelation actually, I can't believe I hadn't thought about this before thank you for bringing this up

[bumbleblurr]

if tf:e bee is my problematic fave then so be it. I'll be the tf:e bee apologist

[astrxealis]

really want to read more and more literature (esp classics!) aghhhh yesterday iirc i was on a walk with my mom and twin and an old guy (not a weirdo dw) who was jogging or walking too actually asked what book i was carrying and it's a little funny bcs uhm he just went "oh a classic!" you see. i was carrying dante's inferno. which i still haven't properly started to read but anyways he might... if my mom is right... be the local parish guy so oopsies !! LMAO anyways yeah really interested in lovecraft for a while now! horror scares me and gives me paranoia but i also enjoy the writing of it? and i remember once that something/someone said my writing is kinda similar to his. hm.

[0-k-4]

the universe is so very inconsistent sometimes. like can't he choose something and just go with it instead of doing ups and downs three times a week i need to know what mental state i should have