#Yes I know what you'll say

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

putting my prediction on record now that the coming decade is going to see the rise of viral-marketed fancy at-home water filtration systems, driving and driven by a drastic reduction in the quality of U.S. tap water (given that we are in a 'replacement era' where our current infrastructure is reaching the end of its lifespan--but isn't being replaced). also guessing that by the 2030s access to drinkable tap water will be a mainstream class issue, with low-income & unstably housed people increasingly forced to rely on expensive bottled water when they can't afford the up-front cost of at-home filtration--and with this being portrayed in media as a "moral failing" and short-sighted "choice," rather than a basic failure of our political & economic systems. really hope i'm just being alarmist, but plenty of this already happens in other countries, and the U.S. is in a state of decline, so. here's praying this post ages into irrelevance. timestamped April 2023

[pseudophan]

i'm so extremely irrationally annoyed by people not knowing what various terms mean and using them incorrectly like i feel like that's such an asshole thing to care about but oh my god stop

[rosieofcorona]

(art ramble, pls feel free to scroll past)

i've seen a few opinions circulating about how being a "true" artist means you enjoy every stage of the process, and while i'm sure some people do feel that way i just don't think it's true for everyone? art is difficult. learning how to draw or paint or sculpt or write requires, like any other skill, immense work and practice and dedication.

i think it's disingenuous to say that true artists love every stage and every second of making art. it's a journey. there's a learning curve. it's frustrating. sometimes you do hours of tinkering just to realize what you've done isn't working. sometimes you start over and over and over. sometimes you throw it out altogether, and you do not love it, and that's okay.

just my opinion, but i think what makes a true artist is really the commitment to learning, and to the improvement of your craft even when it's a challenge. should you be miserable all the time? no. but loving every moment is not a prerequisite either. it's the persistence that makes it a passion.

[tinystepsforward]

ngl it makes me want to die a little bit that it's so often trans people who feel that sex is mutable but oppression is always-forever based on asab in ways that allow them to demand that information from other trans people. like it feels fucking bad. it feels bad when it's people holding up someone who posts a lot of selfies as transition goals to a degree they have to clarify what they have or haven't done or what "direction" they're going in, it feels worse when people are out there like "caster semenya is not tma" or whatever the fuck. i am, as always, not a trans woman, but here's a sentiment echoed by many of the trans women around me who log the fuck off, quoted directly from one: "people who draw a clear line where they say that semenya or khelif are tme and then call me tma are just calling me male at this point".

like i get it. i really do. we seek community and shared experiences, and we feel betrayed when people have less in common with us than we thought they did. [*more on this later.] but that's not those people's faults and my god in the case i'm seeing play out on twitter rn this poor person did absolutely nothing to intentionally mislead people, just posted pictures of their actual kid self. who looks a lot like i did, because shockingly enough "we can always tell" doesn't fucking work for trans people either!

on the one hand i move in intersex circles which are unapologetically welcoming in cis "dyadic" people with pcos, because it serves nobody to draw a clear line where mutilation or genetics or some ineffable childhood suffering are what make somebody intersex, especially when most of us (esp in places like nz) have never been karyotyped and are being treated for symptoms without a pinned-down cause anyway. the more of us there are the stronger we are, the more pressure we can exert on a medical profession which doesn't like to consider how common outliers are, how uneasy sex is at all. and then on the other hand there's dyadic trans people on the internet who've yelled me out of spaces because a couple of traumatised incarcerated trans women i worked with as a prison abolitionist assumed i was also a trans woman and i didn't immediately tell them my entire csa-involved history of being sexed in varying ways as an infant and child and/or exactly how big my phallus was at birth or where in my junk config my urethra lives so they could decide i was tme or whatever.

returning to the * for a related but not identical thought: i think presuming shared experiences leads to some fucked shit in general! "oh we all had a radfem phase" or "oh we all were channers" no we fucking weren't and it's particularly obnoxious when me & mine are trying to build trans community locally to organise and resist the growing wave of far-right backlash against our existence, and there's just white people in there on a spectrum from "straight up being antisemitic and trying to get the n-word pass" through "handwringing about how they need to make space for people who aren't politically correct" to "handwringing about how brown people are right to be mad at them but doing shit fuckall". and then the other fucking brown people in the space are on some identity politics shit where they're like "trans joy inherently excludes those of us who could get deported" or "big city white queers are killing us by being visible instead of going stealth bc it stirs up the discourse" or whatever the fuck i've heard pulled out this year. there's a bunch of reasons i primarily organise outside of trans spaces and that's one of them. i've never felt more alone in spaces where people claim we're all the same than being left as the brownest moderator or organiser in a space full of people to whom "this is a safe trans space" apparently means they get to abdicate all other responsibilities not to lapse into presumed shared patterns that are fucking racist or otherwise alienating. i've never felt more alone than surrounded by exclusively trans people who sort people into boxes and assume everyone in those boxes has the transition goals they have. like i was on cypro until it disagreed with me to the point of endocrine crisis and now i'm on t and at both those points people were so fucking presumptive or entitled to my reasons or journey or personal relationship w my body

literally just submitted on (and was invited to consult on) the nz law commission's review of the human rights act and like. it's straight up fucked how many nz trans people fully do not comprehend that any "sex assigned at birth" type definitions fundamentally exclude migrants who have no way of proving it and many intersex people who happen to have been reassigned later or many times or never assigned at all as a baby. we can't make law with this shit and that's why we have to have symmetrical protections for all genders/sexes/expressions/presentations, bc naming and defining a protected class here often leaves the people who already are left out from those shared experiences of marginalisation out in the cold when they face violence

[skunkes]

might sound weird to say as a person with a couple ocs who have Big Horrible Event(s) in their backstories or as a person who has like 3 ocs total bc he sucks at writing and as a person who hopes their ocs arent too Boring with [the thing im about to mention] but the thing about writing [characters] and [people] is that like.

any little thing a person experiences can take up their whole existence... its actually something "fun" to experience as i meet new ppl and do more things. My friend had something happen that she'll be talking about forever. I had several things happen last year that ill never stop talking about, some of which other ppl think werent that bad actually. In the same way I'll forever remember about the way my sister accidentally insulted me almost 10 years ago, it's really interesting and Fun to find and assign smaller things like that to characters...its really Real. some people's dealbreakers are other people's solvable problems etc etc

[bluevelvetea]

...kinda crazy how they forgot to put this after the end credits...

(open for better quality)

(background is not mine I took this straight from the emotional roller-coaster that was episode 10)

Please just let them hug

[bumblingbabooshka]

Live Fast & Prosper

[dolokhoded]

what i really love about figaro being a barber is that it serves absolutely no purpose to the plot. it's such a random ass useless part of the story and it has no reason to be written in. literally none. and on top of it all it's a Big Thing too the entire opera is called the BARBER of seville he has an entire cavatina talking about what an absolutely spectacular barber he is and that's how he's introduced to us. it's not going to contribute to the plot in any way. but you have to know.

[ereborne]

Song of the Day: March 27

"Long Time Gone" by The Chicks

[dootznbootz]

opinions on helen of sparta being compared to prey animals? blink blink

*blink blinks back* Then immediately sits like this because of the question.

It's a good question that I'm happy to answer! It just makes me mad.... I sincerely hate the wording of "prey" being used to describe her.

SHE IS A VICTIM! THAT DOES NOT MEAN SHE IS "PREY"!

I can...see how people in ancient times may have used that word and still meant it in how she is a victim... but modern-day English-speaking people calling her that??? (considering how in different languages the word "prey" could have different meanings.) I'll just say that as someone who has been "prey" herself at one point, I REALLY hate that word as a descriptor. Just say victim or survivor. 👍

Honestly to call ANY victim "prey" is so fucked up. "Prey" to me, feels like "it's meant to happen." "Prey" are part of the food chain and so that's what happens. And to compare that to abduction and SA? Almost as if "that's our place"? It also kind of implies something being "eaten" or killed... Helen SURVIVES. She's traumatized and definitely needs healing and support but it's not like she can't find joy or peace ever again. Prey just feels so fucking gross.

Also, if someone calls victims "prey", I hope they know that Moose, Elk, Boars, Bovine, ZEBRAS, etc. are technically "prey". And these are VERY aggressive animals while still being "prey" for some other animals. And also that doesn't mean that "Oh, they're powerful! Clearly they should've been able to stop it." That's victim blaming :P

She is a clever, determined, caring woman who was ripped from her home for YEARS because Paris was a dipshit who decided he needed the prettiest woman in the world despite already having a wife. He didn't care about the fact that Helen didn't want to be there and was already married. He is so selfish that he will not let her go back even when THOUSANDS have died in the war! EVEN HIS BROTHER HECTOR AND PRIAM DO NOT BLAME HER! Granted, we do not know if Aphrodite would have let him undo their deal of "I want the prettiest woman" if he DID end up feeling bad for Helen and he wished to let her go home (I doubt it based on his personality though).

"Oh, if she is so independent/strong, then why didn't she just kill Paris and leave?"

AGAIN! Victim blaming!!! First thing, people who ask that have media literacy that is piss on the poor. You also have no idea about the political implications that would have happened if she DID kill Paris. She literally cries about staying there and argues with Aphrodite about seeing Paris, only to get strongarmed by Aphrodite as, guess what? A GODDESS WILL ALWAYS OVERPOWER A DEMIGOD. (This isn't Percy Jackson where he "killed" Ares as a 12 year old (Percy, you were my childhood, but that's bullshit.))

Even confined in Troy, she ARGUED with APHRODITE about going to see Paris! She is not some meek woman who just does as she's told with no pushback! She argued with a GODDESSS! Very few survive doing that!!!

She's not "Prey to fate", she's a "VICTIM of Fate".

[aromantic-karamatsu]

Yeah thing abt anxiety is you actually literally do have to grab your brain sometimes and go "Are you actually in danger?! Is this problem something we can actually fix now or is it a situation that is out of our control and therefore worrying about it actually does nothing?! Huh?!" And then force yourself to realize what situations your anxiety is ACTUALLY helpful and how to let go in situations where it isnt

Unfortunately this is not a skill that you get with a snap of your fingers, you literally have to TEACH yourself how to do it and it's painful.

Even more unfortunately rational people sitting outside of your anxiety are NOT AWARE that this is a literal skill you were basically born without and just tell you "calm down" without understanding YOU DON'T HAVE THE TOOLS TO BE ABLE TO DO THAT. If someone who was super good at weight lifting told me, a beginner at weights, to just "pick up a 50 pound dumbbell" I'D DIE, because I haven't trained to do that! I quite literally don't have the muscle or knowledge on proper techniques to do that without hurting myself, physically or emotionally!!!

So yes, sometimes you DO have to take the high road and just tell yourself "I do NOT need to worry about this" even though it feels stupid and useless because you still worry, but you also have to forgive yourself and understand you are learning! It won't be easy the first few times, and even when you get more used to self soothing and emotional regulation sometimes it's not linear and it's like your first day of lifting weights all over again!

I just think we as a society do need to understand that anxious disorders are both something we (anxious people) can NOT control without effort and therapy and that we (anxious people) need to realize sometimes we DO have to put in painful, uncomfortable work to manage it! It sucks but thats life, and it can get easier with the right support and whatever treatment looks like for you!

[laugtherhyena]

Playing Bomb rush cyberfunk has been a crazy experience so far because i feel like I've been enjoying the game just as much as I'm not doing so

[rockafirevevo]

i am very grateful for this new trend in internet horror that is just. childish thing that the creator clearly knows a lot about and has a genuine fondness for. but expanded on and turned dark in a thoughtful way

[monty-glasses-roxy]

Okay so that AU based on Plex History stuff and the song the Horse and the Infant from Epic the Musical?

It's a medieval fantasy style AU, with magic, gods, kingdoms, and fucked monarchies. Bonnie is the prince of a kingdom who becomes friends with Roxy, a wolf from a northern town in the middle of nowhere. He and his father are considered very close to the gods and have been visited and guided by them many a time before. Meanwhile, Roxy was found nearly dead on a riverbank when she was a very small puppy and was adopted by Music Man. She was raised like her siblings (the Minis) by Music Man and the local community, is the best horse racer in the Northern regions and has nothing to do with the known gods ever outside of her regular education.

They meet at Roxy's first horse race in the South that just so happens to be in Bonnie's kingdom and the one he's also competing in. While all the other competitors recognise Bonnie either by name or face, Roxy doesn't have a god damn clue who this guy is and that throws Bonnie so off guard that they end up being friends.

However, since winning the race, Roxy has started to be visited in her dreams by a green, rabbit-looking god. He tells her very little she understands and honestly she doesn't care about this guy at all or what this "destiny" bullshit he keeps going on about is. Bonnie on the other hand, is receiving a few vague warnings not to trust his new friend, but don't exactly tell him why so he's not really sure what to make of it. But... well his father has been acting a bit weird lately... like he's afraid of something, almost seeming paranoid about some sort of attack on the kingdom... Weird...

So anyway, he hangs out with Roxy some more! I'm not sure how to approach the next part of the plot as there's a lot of options here, but basically, he goes on a trip with Roxy and their mutual friends to a kingdom his father defeated when he was little. They also find out what kind of atrocities he and his men committed there and what the fuck that has to do with Roxy, which, if you know the song I'm talking about you can probably make a pretty good guess where I'm going with this. Oh and also the place is crazy haunted and the ghosts all have it out for Bonnie specifically.

For those that don't know the song, the gods (Glitchtrap/Afton/Whoever) pressured and manipulated Bonnie's father into killing the baby of the royals he'd just killed in war. Except in this case, they didn't check the baby puppy was actually fucking dead before they moved on and forgot about her... until she showed up again in the kingdom they like fucking with the most. And makes friends with her would-be murderer's son with seemingly absolutely no knowledge of any of this shit.

But uhhh yeah this is basically a story about gods playing dolls with mortals and the consequences that has on them. And Old Man Consequences is there. He gets to be very cool here.

[eddsworldstuck]

whenever the full album drops from Marianas Trench, i'd like it to be known that i am weak for this band

and if more chapter names change to more songs from the new album inspired by the hero's journey, it's not my fault

"Joker did you change any chapter names to the new MT singles that recently released?" maybe

[sysig]

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