#a manifesto of sorts

[snowbodyatall]

My boyfriend is getting out of jail on Tuesday, and I'm not excited which says a lot about our relationship I think. it's not that I don't love him because I do, it's just that he's done some pretty s***** things to me in the past like spitting in my face while we walk down the street three times, and just other generally abusive things. I try to keep in mind that that was while we were in our addiction, but he has a baby mom that he did pretty much the same kind of things too over the course of their 11-year relationship. That's not something that I'm interested in, but I didn't mean to fall in love with him. He didn't mean to fall in love with me either. It just sort of happened. I kind of feel like I owe him a chance to see what he's like while he's sober but he's already flipped out on me one time accusing me of cheating on him while I'm in all female halfway house, and I have no way of leaving this place, and knowing full well that I don't talk to anybody because I'm completely anti people. Like I truly do not like to talk to people at all and rarely ever give anybody the time of day. I have to really feel something special and somebody to talk to them. It's been really hard for me to even get close to any of the girls here and I've only gotten close to one or two of them my entire 4 months stay here. I also don't want to have to answer someone constantly about where I'm at what I'm doing and that kind of thing; I've gotten used to my Independence and I like my solitude- I'm in a period of healing and I'm THRIVING. A relationship is likely to take me out and by that I mean to make me relapse, and I do not want to ever stick a needle in my arm again over a boy. I don't want to do that for anything. I do not want to ever be that person again. I'm not willing to give up my recovery for anything or anyone. I have told him that in order for this relationship to work that he needs to put himself into intensive therapy to fix the things that are wrong with him because I'm not putting up with it and that I will have a healthy relationship if it's the last thing I do because I'm not going to have a relationship like him and his baby moms cuz that's not cute and I don't want it, and if that's what he thinks love is then he can really shove it, and he doesn't love me. I'm not excited at all for my boyfriend to come home.

[karinonsan]

i will write that time travel fic before 2024 ends

[cerebipalsy]

Apropos of last reblog I’ve decided to make a list of how I want to live instead of the current situation:

I want to have a place that’s far enough from my mom that it actually feels like my own

I want to have a credit card and bank account that she doesn’t have access to

I want to feel safe speaking up for my beliefs, especially around family

I want to be able to go places in my wheelchair outside of campus

Hell, I want to have the energy to go places and see people and do things more than like once a week

I want to have my pain well-controlled if not eliminated

I want to feel confident in my academics

I want to feel empowered to get more involved in the world

I want to have more friends IRL

I want to fall in love and have sex with someone attainable

I want to start HRT

I want to be able to live past graduate school without dreading having to work more than three hours a day

I want to have the means to cook for myself

I want to learn what being healthy means for me without worrying about what my parents think

I want to be free from my guilt and shame

I want to be happy and not have to take antidepressants for another 10 years

[crowgore-throwaway]

Good evening, Disco Elysium fandom,

GUESS WHAT I DID, BITCH??!

You have no clue how happy I am with myself for finishing this project. I've been working on it since August, so after about 4-5ish months of formatting, printing, binding, and gluing, I'm finally done making my copy of Sacred and Terrible Air. Now I can finally properly read it!

Tbh, it wasn't 5 months of straight work. I formatted the pdf in August, which was around a week, but I didn't have access to a printer until October, so I ordered my paper and waited. I only had enough for the first five signatures, so I ordered more paper and printed the rest in November. It took an afternoon to fold and bind all the signatures, and I spent the past week finishing the text block and making the cover. I did the lettering on the spine today (which isn't the straightest, but I'm impressed with myself for painting so intricately on less than smoothe fabric. I actually considered gilding it, but I thought it'd be a step too far, so I went with gold paint.

All in all, I didn't expect myself to be able to do it since I tell myself I'm gonna do things, then get depressed and don't do them. But this project turned out amazing, and I'm glad to have this piece of writing on my shelf, crafted by me. (I will admit, I gave myself a credit on the second page, but who cares?).

All that aside, I've only skimmed S&TA when I was formatting, so I only have a loose understanding of the plot, characters, and events, but since I have a physical copy and some free time later this month, I'll finally get the chance to experience the work of Kurvitz himself, and the people who put so much effort into translating it for the English-speaking fans.

Alright, that's all.

Enjoy the rest of the weekend. :D

[fluentisonus]

sorry this is just a running thought process so very unedited but one of the big failures I feel like with the whole situation in montreuil sur mer -- and this is not really jean valjean's fault bc like. he's just some guy who has been outside of society for nearly twenty years and was making this up as he went along & learning & making mistakes as he went -- is that it was all based around charity rather than much actual systematic or solid structural change. which like again I don't really think as a small town mayor in the early 19th century he was really in a position to wholesale restructure anything, so he really was just working with what he had to hand, but I do keep thinking that part of his whole dilemma in 'a tempest in skull' -- i.e. if he turns himself in then the whole system of schools & hospitals & pensions for old people & support for the poor he's set up will essentially collapse -- really shows the failure of charity on its own to accomplish any lasting change. like even if champmathieu hadn't turned up what would have happened to the town if/when he died? the same thing quite probably I'd imagine. tbh I think you could potentially make an argument in fact that the book's position on charity in many ways is that it really does help in the moment individually or in communities but it does nothing really to get at or change the root causes of poverty, & m sur m is to me an example of that -- although I'm not entirely sure how much hugo himself saw the situation in m-sur-m as a flaw (well. he obviously saw valjean's situation re champmathieu itself as a genuinely sticky moral problem, but whether he saw the fundamental basis for the system valjean set up in m sur m as a problem I can't really tell). but anyways I've just been thinking this one over as I reread the champmathieu bit

[thewhizzyhead]

okay with the knowledge that the warriors film actually had no strong anti-cop message in it and that it focused mainly on being an action piece of gangs traversing the violence of new york, I now feel extremely validated in my thoughts of warriors (2024) being a LOT more intersectional than I first thought it would be. Rather than just riding on the coats of genderbending gimmicks and popular play-safe and shallow "woo girl power" semantics, the album deepens the context through emphasising their struggle and the choice to partake in it not just as women but as a member of marginalized misfits once united under the promise of collective resistance against the police - the 'baddest gang in the city' - and a better future for their constituents.

I dunno I just,,,perhaps I was just surprised to see something quite ballsily critical from lmm's repertoire - transferring a 70's movie loved for action and slight social commentary but ultimately catered to the macho twt filmbros, into a timeless piece that holds no bars in actually featuring intersectional struggle.

[ladysternchen]

Elves are per default bi-sexual. Period. Sex always marks marriage is bullshit. Period. There are polyamorous relationships in Valinor. My hot-takes on the Laws and Customs

Ok, ok, I didn't want to write anything for today, but my brain won't leave me in peace.

Ok, first point, Elves are bi-sexual. They find their mates because they find their mates, regardless of their sex. Also, they may in some cases have both (yes yes, I'm pushing my own fic here in which Mablung is much more than just Elu's captain).

Accordingly, no, sex does not mark marriage. I mean, yes, it does, but only if they want to. They can totally fuck without bonding, though. Especially in their youth (as in- there was A LOT of fucking on the Great Journey- my favourite headcanon is still Beleg, Mablung and Elu there. They were not at all grown up then, and Beleg especially loved experimenting. They were BOTH never just his captains.)

(Edit: ok, my laptop threatened to die on me, problem fixed now, continuing)

Sometimes in Valinor, those former relationships lead to... interesting constellations. Mark my words, Míriel and Indis are a couple, but a huge huge huge part of their relationship is missing Finwë together. Yeah, Maedhros is totally living with Fingon and his wife. And hey, Mablung, Elu and Melian worked very well in that story of mine. Idk if I'd call it my headcanon, but they worked. Oh, and if you ship them, Elrond, Celebían and Gil-galad are totally a thing. There are many more that work like that. And yeah, they still keep their bonds.

[tenderlady]

hi love!! out of curiosity, i didn't know about the lindsay ellis video, how bad is it?

hey, friend!

so, the video itself is here:

in the interest of full disclosure, i haven't actually seen it, so i really can't comment on the quality. my beef is not with lindsay ellis or the work that she's doing--as far as youtubers go, i think she's actually one of the better ones. this video might actually be good! but i haven't watched it, so i, frankly, don't know. my beef is much more with the video essay as a form and what it's doing rather than with lindsay ellis, or this video, specifically.

i'm guessing you're asking because of my tags on this post, which articulates a lot of my issues with the video essay industrial complex lmao, which gets at a lot of my discomfort with them. i used to watch video essays (a lot!), and a lot of my friends still do. like a lot of people, when i got out of grad school, i found i wasn't reading as much anymore, but i still wanted to be stimulated intellectually, and video essays were a good way to do that. but eventually i realized that i wasn't actually Learning Anything lol.

as ismatu gwendolyn says in her piece, "short-form video entertains more than it sticks." this was the place i was finding myself getting into when i was watching video essays a lot, and also the place i see my friends getting into. they are video (and arguably this isn't really short-form since it's over an hour long but i digress), but i find that most people i know don't actually Watch Them the way that you would watch a movie or, say, a lecture in a college class. instead they listen to them as you would listen to a podcast or an audiobook, which is to say While Doing Other Things. some of this is definitely because of the way our current economy is structured (a lot of the people listening to video essays are very busy, i.e., in university or working in a professional desk-type job, or have minimal downtime when not doing those things and have to double dip with their free time, so like things they can use to multi-task), and that is something i totally understand. but if we're looking at these as pedagogical objects (teaching tools from people who are trying to impart knowledge in some kind of way) they're actually not very effective. i respect folks like philosophy tube or contrapoints who include reading lists with their videos, but how many people are actually turning to these original sources? another of gwendolyn's points that i absolutely agree with is that you are engaging with a work in a totally different way by reading it. you have to give a written text your full attention, which is why the backbone of education is still Reading. this full attention forces you to have a deeper engagement with a text than you would while listening to it ambiently, or even just watching it. i get that there are people who can't do this for various reasons, but if actually sitting down with the texts a video essayist is talking about is available to you, you will find a totally different experience, even if those texts are just beatlebooks lol. (additionally, primary video texts--like interview footage of the beatles and yoko--are also hugely informative and different from the interpretive work i'm assuming is happening in lindsay's video)

i actually watched a good chunk of contrapoints' most recent video on desire but ended up dipping around the middle because she brought up anne carson and i realized i could just be reading anne carson lmao. i told a friend about this and he looked at me like i had sprouted an extra head and said "i never really thought about doing that. you're probably the only person i know who's ever done that." i get that like, 5 nerds in usamerica are hardly a representative sample, but that is the kind of behavior i see with video essays: people using them to fill a void of silence while they work/study/play video games/fold laundry rather than engaging with the material critically and learning in a concerted way.

the entertainment aspect is also something that bugs me, but i am a joyless hag, so that may just be me. i have a similar issue with john oliver. folks like oliver and the video essayists are definitely making complex issues more accessible to people who may be unfamiliar, but i don't know if they actually do much in the way of using that opened door to get people anywhere. there's also the issue of video essays being monetized. this isn't to say that Theory(TM) Isn't Monetized (they are published in journals and books, which you often have to buy), but that monetization isn't embedded into the work itself the way it is with video essays. nothing kills the vibe for me like talking about the great works of a philosopher and getting jumpscared by an ad for rocketmortgage or nordvpn halfway through.

like i said: i've watched video essays from time to time. i still do! but sometime in the last like.....4 or 5 years i realized that there were other things i could be doing with my One Wild & Precious Life.

to bring it back to the lindsay ellis video: i had a bunch of irl's (including a fucking ex that i don't talk to anymore!!!!!) send it to me, and i'm sure lindsay does a good job, but i kind of doubt she's going to tell me anything i don't already know lmao. one thing i love about the beatles fandom on here is that (for the most part) we aren't afraid to actually do Real Research Ourselves. the girlies are reading primary sources!!!! i just feel like the lindsay ellis beatle video is Not For Me, but feel free to prove me wrong!

[lavenderorchard]

since the last song off of the post traumatic manifesto is released i thought i'd show off my oc to celebrate! his name's Ambivalent "Girl" and he kinda reflects my complicated feelings of being a trans guy, being attracted to men, and having past fears regarding men. it was really cathartic to make him [:

drawings of him and my friend @ghosts-in-season 's oc Contaminated Boy are under the cut!

i love them dearly

ref photos for those both:

[demonstars]

the clock is moving faster than it used to move

chapter 1

5.1 k | Rated T | In Progress

Tags: Kid Fic, Surprise Baby, Angst with a Happy Ending

Right now, all he needs to know is this: he can be a good friend. Skeppy needs him right now. Anything else can be pushed back a month. 

[randomnameless]

Whenever you have a Supreme Leader line, always double check to see if it isn't one of Pat's specialities!

So, Pat!Supreme Leader wants to force (uh) the people of Fodlan to open their eyes to the truth contained in her manifesto (CoS BaD, Kingdom and Alliance nobles BaD), and those people, after having their eyes opened, will abandon the idea of wanting to resist against Adrestia invading their homes and conquering their lands.

FE16's Supreme Leader wants to use her manifesto to cause "disquiet" in the lands to be conquered : this disquiet will influence people to not rebel when Adrestia will knock at their doors.

[detective-werewife]

im not usually one for placing a ton of weight on a books morality when it comes to literature studies. i do think that if a work is deeply influential you have to at least get acquainted with it (for example i fucking hate knut hamsun the nazi piece of shit, but he Is an important figure in norwegian literature, and i have to at least know his name and what he stands for).

that being said, jesus christ. sometimes you have to read a book one page at a time because the sheer lack of respect for women the author clearly has is staggering.

[mariocki]

Fat Man on a Beach (HTV, 1974)

"I'm going to read some more poems now. Erm. It may be that if you want to go and have a cup of tea, this would be a good time. I know that's what you masses are like. The mention of poetry and off you go."

[gomacave]

MY GDDDDD I JUST FINISHED CH 9 OH MY GODDDDD CATASTROPHIC 8 ON THE EVIL WOMAN SCALE MY GODDDD MY GODDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD TOXIC YURI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

rebirth ch9 spoilers under cut...

I LOVE YOU EVIL YURI I LOVE YOU TOXIC YURI I LOVE YOU GASLIGHTING I LOVE U EVIL WOMAN (to me)

[twotothehalf]

i just woke up from like, the most vivid dream of me storyboarding an mlp au fanfic where starlight glimmer stayed in her town post-reformation and make amends with her townsfolk by expanding their town into a massive urban center, rivalling even manehattan on the east coast.

it's got some stuff about the folks of our town reshaping their cult ideology into something that's genuinely focused on welfare of its people and egalatarianism and social equality

there's something that fleshed out why the townsfolk stayed behind in starlight's town after s5 premiere, some stuff about the town gaining political autonomy from canterlot.

and when i woke up i could not remember a single word of it. so now i'm just sad, because dream me was genuinely excited about coming up with something really cool to add to the mlp universe.

[biodigital]

Kind of rough design ramblings but I settled on some choices for my current fursona/mascot, Bio. They're a funny little dragon that wants to become a cool wizard (short bio in pic. no pun intended)

I've used Cas (purple cat guy I post here and there) as my mascot for a while, but I've grown out of him solely representing me, though I still love him as a character. also I've wanted to make a dragon-creature mascot for a long long time

when it comes to personal characters, I end up REALLY indecisive and usually just keep em in my head (even though I'll obviously be drawing and developing them over time). I'm trying to break that mould of being hesistant to make my characters so I made myself have something concrete at least lol. I'm pleased with him for now