#again no expectations or pressure

[1zashreena1]

So. I've never done this before, but I have helped others this way, some even here on tumblr. As I'm sure y'all know, my little man has been in and out of vet hospitals this past year. We're working on paying it down, but my job just cut all overtime and I'm chronically ill so I can no longer do typical 2nd jobs like retail and shit. My partner was laid off and then forced into a different position where the pay is lower because there is no overtime or shift differential (went from 2nd shift to 1st). I charged his bills to an emergency line of credit that has 33% interest. If anyone wants to do some kindness for a furbaby we would be ecstatic and grateful.

Thank you for reading this, there is no pressure or expectation here, and thank you all for being here. Whether you can and/or do help or not, please know that tumblr is the first social place I've ever felt like I belonged and that's thanks to all of you.

Pics for tax

[jetkast]

Arcane S01E04

he didn't get to crank it lakdjflkajdlksf

the true harbinger of the endtimes

[cometblaster2070]

so hey yk how in literally the 4th episode of the show there's that bit where adora's like glimmer I don't think your mom likes me and glimmer's like what are you talking about my mom loves you! and then adora corrects her and says that she loves she-ra, not adora.

and do you ever think about how there's always been some sort of expectation on adora like expectation to be a good loyal horde soldier, expectation to be force captain and lead the horde to victory one day and it just segues into the expectation to become she-ra and become a paragon of goodness and strength and all.

and how adora's self-worth is actually genuinely fucking shit because she feels that she's under so much pressure from everyone around her to always be the best version of herself and how she's supposed to always be perfect and do everything perfectly and she's never allowed to make mistakes because then she could disappoint the people that rely on her. but she always feels like she's disappointing everyone and that she never does anything right and that her best will never suffice.

just like adora feeling that she herself is not good enough, will never be good enough, but maybe she-ra will; she-ra is supposed to be good enough and is supposed to be perfect, so that's what adora will be if it will make those around her happy.

(edit: might have a mini side-rant on adora vs. the expectations vs. catra who doesn't expect anything from adora and just wants her)

[ghastigiggles]

OKAY WAIT IDK IF U HAD THIS KIND OF HC OR NOT

Seb has ticklish ears (sorry for bothering u ;-;)

theres also a hc going around that he purrs and im kinda insane over it actually...

( disclaimer: DONT do this he will kill you for real. audie is just gods favourite little princess and can do whatever they want. /j )

[nabaath-areng]

I have way too many alts that I keep to myself (which is why I generally refrain from posting them), but I'm going to ignore that habit for a moment just because I'm feeling particularly insane about this guy.

[moeblob]

Happy Birthday to Ferdinand von Aegir!

I actually made 33 emotes, affectionately known as Aegirglyphics to some, for my own personal use on discord. However, I figure why not share some of them! They're free to use for discord servers/icons/pfps or whatever. However, my only request is Do NOT use them as subscriber emotes on Twitch. You can make them free follower emotes but you are not to make them locked behind a paywall.

[icarianstars]

✨THE SAVIOUR✨

[wavesoutbeingtossed]

I know you don't like discussing the muses but i love your takes and perspectives and i had to ask you about this. after listening to ttpd, did you have the impression that she really loved matty more than any of her exes/previous relationships?. And listening to the whole album as a whole would you call it the ''matty album'' or do you think there are more prominent themes in there than their period together?. (hope this doesn't bother you, feel free to delete if you don't feel like answering it)

hey anon! You're right, I don't really like to get into the muses as I don't really think there's anything to add to the conversation at this point, and ultimately I don't think it matters.

That being said, and with the caveat that I am not Taylor and I do not know Taylor so I cannot speak to her thoughts and can only make relatively educated guesses based on being an avid consumer of her work and a student of the human condition (lol), no I do not think Taylor loved Matty more than anyone else. I think there was maybe a brief period in the thick of things where she *thought* she did because she was not thinking clearly and was in full-on denial, but to me the message that is loud and clear in the album (and more or less explicitly stated in the epilogue) is that it was not any kind of real love affair. It was certainly infatuation and lust and the promise of something more, and there may have been some love as well, but he was in no way the love of her life by any measure.

I would call it a "Matty album" insofar as they're about events in which he was present, sure. But I feel it much more as a Taylor album, if that makes sense, even though I know that's a cop out because every album is to a degree. I can't explain it well, but I don't see TTPD as a Matty (or Joe) album in the way that I would maybe say Red is a "Jake" album or 1989 may be a "Harry" album or even Lover being a "Joe" album whatever, because even if they don't figure in all the songs, that kind of heartbreak permeates so much of the material.

The thing about TTPD and the Matty situation is that the Matty situation is really a Joe situation (which in some ways is actually partially a Jake situation). I always say I hate treating Taylor like a character so I hate speaking about her and her work in this way, but you don't get the Matty situation without the Joe situation precipitating it. It's @taylortruther's now-infamous donut vs. hole analogy. The reason Taylor makes the choices she does with Matty is directly tied to what happened with Joe that made her feel she needed to. Which is not to say Taylor isn't responsible for her own actions or doesn't have agency in her own life, but I mean it in that the situation in which she found herself with Joe, and the pain it caused, is what made the alternative so comforting and perhaps even necessary in her mind. It's why it makes it so hard to "paternity test" the album, because the stories are inherently intertwined and you don't get the former without the latter.

The major "theme" of the album to me is the loss of a very specific, very personal dream, and the way in which she lost it, and the way in which grieving that loss drove her to make the choices she did. We're all talking very delicately about it because it's a sensitive topic, but it's late on Friday and few people are going to see this, so I'm going to say it: it's the give you my wild, give you a child of it all. The yearning she expresses both overtly and sub-textually for having a family in the album is palpable in a very iykyk kind of way, and it's the realization that those plans are not going to come to fruition in the way she had once imagined that drives a lot of the pain she experiences, and makes her jump at the chance to find that again with someone else.

I started a draft post about the theme of womanhood and motherhood on TTPD three months ago that I never finished because I ran out of time and ran out of steam, but it was the most striking thing to me on the album, not because I didn't know that she wanted those things because that's been obvious for years (definitely since Lover, and again, peace put it all on the table), but because the vulnerability she expressed about it on the album is incredibly moving, and it's so generous of her to trust listeners with those feelings and experiences.

Again, it's the thirtysomething of it all.

She is in relationship A which she at one point believes is forever, one which she at one point believes is going to lead to marriage and children. She is so committed to that dream that she either ignores or tries to fix serious issues that may otherwise lead others to think the two people in the relationship are incompatible, both because she loves the person deeply and because she feels that this is meant to be the way she achieves that dream. She gives it her everything, and it still dies a slow, painful, onerous death, and she feels like it may take her along with it. The dream of getting married and presumably having a family gets taken off the table: how we don't know and will likely never know because that is private between the parties involved. All that matters in the context of the album is that those plans never come to fruition and never would.

Then you have relationship B, an old flame who knows just enough buttons to push both to trigger and to flatter. A person who she presumably trusts with very sensitive, personal information as her life slowly crumbles, and this person is telling her all the things she wants to hear because he knows about what is happening in relationship A because she's told him. Person in relationship B doesn't get an "in" with her and sell her this dream unless what happens in relationship A precedes it. It's not a grand love affair for the ages, it's not a mutual decision on building their own dream together. It's Person B learning about what is happening with Person A and saying "I can do that!" even if he can't or doesn't. The dream he sells her is a rental car; it's not his own, he's just borrowing it from someone else and selling it back to her.

And the reason she falls for it is because it is what she aches for the most in her personal life, and she is grappling with it disintegrating, so she (unfortunately for her) falls for the easy way out, and in turn sells herself a story about how this must be fated, and this must be meant to be, because this person wants all the same things she does and she didn't even have to bargain for it! Well, yes, because she fed him the dream in the first place. (Like a mark falling for a sleeper cell spy.) It's too good to be true because it isn't true. IMO Person B doesn't come running out of the gate with the marriage/baby/dream life promises unless he knows that is what she most desires. But what's left unsaid out of all of it is that: those dreams were her dreams because they were her dreams with Person A. It was a whole life they had together, and a whole life they had planned for in some fashion, and a whole life that has to be dismantled in the aftermath.

So all this to say, yes, on the surface, Matty is a "main character" on the album, but truly he's a side character to Taylor as the narrator and person experiencing it and Joe as the ghost bit-player-who-haunts-every-scene. (Again, I hate referring to real people as characters, it gives me the absolute ick, but in this case it's the only way to answer the question.) I jokingly call it the Matty album for shorthand or when I want to say something out of pocket, but really, it's a disservice to the album to say that because it's not a muse album as in it's about the romance (like, say, Red often is), it's about a soul-crushing heartbreak that goes beyond it. The romance is the symptom, not the cause.

The loss of youth is tied in with all this: she's not 22 anymore. She isn't even 32 anymore. She had a very specific idea of what her life was going to look like at this point and had planned for that life, and it goes up in smoke. But again, to bring the womanhood into it all: there is, unfortunately, a deadline for these things. You're with someone for over half a decade you think is going to be your life partner and father of your children and and then he's not. You spent half a decade building this relationship for it to crumble, but now you're in your mid-30s and you don't necessarily have another half-decade to build that trust and faith in someone else before being ready to start a family. And maybe you're scared that anyone else who may become your partner will need that much time to build that trust and faith, because that's kind of all you've ever know in relationships. But lo and behold, someone comes into your life you once had feelings for and maybe now do again and is offering you everything you want and thought you'd have by this point in your life right now. It feels like an elixir that as we find out is actually poison.

That youth is not just the chance for motherhood, but it's also the hopes and idealism and belief in the future that often gradually erodes as we age. But for Taylor as well, it's also tied into the trauma of what she went through particularly in 2016, which kicks off a lot of things on the album as well (her retreat, her relationship with Joe, the pivoting in her career, etc.). That event caused a pretty clear before/after in her life (like a few other events, I suspect), and another major theme in the album is her finally grappling with the full weight of that. They're all different branches of the same tree of the story of TTPD and her life.

I could talk about this stuff forever, but I'm going to stop here because it's long enough and I should save stuff for one of the dozens of drafts I have half-baked lol. But this is just something I needed to get off my chest perhaps.

[itspileofgoodthings]

ALSO I am learning how to teach very introverted students, something my natural skillset as a teacher does not help me with.

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

Outdrawn

f/f contemporary romance

two cartoonist who’ve been rivals since uni, and now have competing webcomics online, have to work together on the relaunch of a cult classic at the comic press they both work at

they both struggle with art-related physical and mental health issues, and complicated families

[tj-crochets]

Still no craft updates on account of I feel Bad* but I did get like half a beanie crocheted this weekend? I also have a bat that's haunting me. In that there's a bat design I desperately want to turn into a plushie not in that I am being literally haunted by a bat. As far as I know I am not haunted by a bat but to be fair I'm not confident I'd know? *my heart rate got high enough that made me cough but my asthma was flaring up enough that cough launched me into an asthma attack, which raised my heart rate even more, so basically I used my emergency inhaler and then was on the floor for a while. Feels bad! Do not recommend. I'm okay though just tired

[magpie-blues]

If you haven’t watched Ultraman Rising yet on Netflix do it now.

I never thought I would cry so hard.

Why was it actually so good-

[koka-mi]

I FINALLY FULL COMBO'D IT LET'S GOOO!!!!! a little more normals than I would like (6) but at least I full combo'd it!!! that's all I care about at this point xD

[radarsteddybear]

I recently dug up a comment sheet written about me from my first grade teacher, and one of the things she noted was that my handwriting was terrible and that I seemed to really struggle with letter formation and also putting the letters on the lines properly (which are both still things I'm not particularly good at). And I can't help but wonder if I'd have benefited from OT.

[tuesdayscanons]

Every now and then, I think about The Simpsons RPC and how there's an occasionally a spike of Simpsons muses that inevitably crumbles away and leaves me waiting for the next short lived Simpsons RPC Renaissance

[nabaath-areng]

Everytime I think I'm too unskilled to try making a certain FFXIV mod I have to remind myself that 1) I am literally never one to be stopped by inexperience when trying new things otherwise so why would I be now and 2) Eight year old Silvi learned HTML to make web pages to post their scanned pencil YGO fanart on and taught themself how to make Sims 2 mods through trial and error and would therefore be EXTREMELY disappointed by this sudden willful lack of initiative