#and i don't plan on being here next year

[bandedbulbussnarfblat]

ugh i just want to go home

[random-autie-fangirl]

I drew another Chara- living with the Dreemurrs edition

"The King and Queen treated the human child as their own. The underground was filled with hope."

I don't like this as much as the last one but oh well... I ended up rambling a huge amount in the tag, so if you want details and headcanons about the actual drawing again, you'll have to look pretty far down this time, sorry (Also, I ran out of tags after a while. Tumblr is tired of me, lol. I might reblog this more tags later if I remember what I was going to say.)

[folkloregirlfriend]

i hate feeling ambitionless aimless the future is so bleak

[queerstudiesnatural]

i think my brain should be studied i'm being fr

[autixel]

honestly i don't think i'm satisfied with tdp s7

[mechazushi]

I had to teach myself editing software on my phone *Racking shotgun noises* Applaud Me.

[depressedtheatrekiddo]

I found someone in my classroom!!! She's so cool and I've sat next to her last year and she always loves to talk and I loved to listen to school recent gossip and this year she's on my latin classes and we've been getting back in touch and!!! And!!! We discovered we both have similar ideas!! I'm explaining her anarchist theory and she shares acab media she just discovered, we circle the 13/12 date in the classroom blackboard and run, I send her tutorials I've discovered on how to do moss graffiti and she asks for information about world events and if I don't know about them we investigate together and then we exchange opinions!! And this, this is so special to me, because I've been trying to connect with someone in my surroundings, and there wasn't— interest. Like I talk and there's this tight smile on my friends face. And. And sometimes it breaks my heart? But this. This is so fucking cool.

[al-mayriti]

btw after four years i finally finished all data from my iberian-inspired fakemon region. if you even care

[adhdphilosopher]

im so full of anger every day that it makes it hard to function. what do i do

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[seventh-district]

ough i've been neglecting my side-blogs and tumblr in general so badly lately. i need more time in my day

[ceilidhtransing]

The discussions around whether or not to vote for Kamala keep being dominated by very loud voices shouting that anyone who advocates for her “just doesn't care about Palestine!” and “is willing to overlook genocide!” and “has no moral backbone at all!” And while some of these voices will be bots, trolls, psyops - we know that this happens; we know that trying to persuade progressives to split the vote or not vote at all is a strategy employed by hostile actors - of course many of them won't be. But what this rhetoric does is continually force the “you should vote for her” crowd onto the back foot of having to go to great lengths writing entire essays justifying their choice, while the “don't vote/vote third party” crowd is basically never asked to justify their choice. It frames voting for Kamala as a deeply morally compromised position that requires extensive justification while framing not voting or voting third party as the neutral and morally clean stance.

So here's another way of looking at it. How much are you willing to accept in order to feel like you're not compromising your morals on one issue?

Are you willing to accept the 24% rise in maternal deaths - and 39% increase for Black women - that is expected under a federal abortion ban, according to the Centre for American Progress? Those percentages represent real people who are alive now who would die if the folks behind Project 2025 get their way with reproductive healthcare.

Are you willing to accept the massive acceleration of climate change that would result from the scrapping of all climate legislation? We don't have time to fuck around with the environment. A gutting of climate policy and a prioritisation of fossil fuel profits, which is explicitly promised by Trump, would set the entire world back years - years that we don't have.

Are you willing to accept the classification of transgender visibility as inherently “pornographic” and thus the removal of trans people from public life? Are you willing to accept the total elimination of legal routes for gender-affirming care? The people behind the Trump campaign want to drive queer and trans people back underground, back into the closet, back into “criminality”. This will kill people. And it's maddening that caring about this gets called “prioritising white gays over brown people abroad” as if it's not BIPOC queer and trans Americans who will suffer the most from legislative queer- and transphobia, as they always do.

Are you willing to accept the domestic deployment of the military to crack down on protests and enforce racist immigration policy? I'm sure it's going to be very easy to convince huge numbers of normal people to turn up to protests and get involved in political organising when doing so may well involve facing down an army deployed by a hardcore authoritarian operating under the precedent that nothing he does as president can ever be illegal.

Are you willing to accept a president who openly talks about wanting to be a dictator, plans on massively expanding presidential powers, dehumanises his political enemies and wants the DOJ to “go after them”, and assures his supporters they won't have to vote again? If you can't see the danger of this staring you right in the face, I don't know what to tell you. Allowing a wannabe dictator to take control of the most powerful country on earth would be absolutely disastrous for the entire world.

Are you willing to accept an enormous uptick in fascism and far-right authoritarianism worldwide? The far right in America has huge influence over an entire international network of “anti-globalists”, hardcore anti-immigrant xenophobes, transphobic extremists, and straight-up fascists. Success in America aids and emboldens these people everywhere.

Are you willing to accept an enormous number of preventable deaths if America faces a crisis in the next four years: a public health emergency, a natural disaster, an ecological catastrophe? We all saw how Trump handled Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. We all saw how Trump handled Covid-19. He fanned the flames of disaster with a constant flow of medical misinformation and an unspeakably dangerous undermining of public health experts. It's estimated that 40% of US pandemic deaths could have been avoided if the death rates had corresponded to those in other high-income countries. That amounts to nearly half a million people. One study from January 2021 estimated between around 4,200 and 12,200 preventable deaths attributable purely to Trump's statements about masks. We're highly unlikely to face another global pandemic in the next few years but who knows what crises are coming down the pipeline?

Are you willing to accept the attempted deportation of millions - millions - of undocumented people? This is “rounding people up and throwing them into camps where no one ever hears from them again” territory. That's a blueprint for genocide right there and it's a core tenet of both Trump's personal policy and Project 2025. And of course they wouldn't be going after white people. They most likely wouldn't even restrict their tyranny to people who are actually undocumented. Anyone racially othered as an “immigrant” would be at risk from this.

Are you willing to accept not just the continuation of the current situation in Palestine, but the absolute annihilation of Gaza and the obliteration of any hope for imminent peace? There is no way that Trump and the people behind him would not be catastrophically worse for Gaza than Kamala or even Biden. Only recently he was telling donors behind closed doors that he wanted to “set the [Palestinian] movement back 25 or 30 years” and that “any student that protests, I throw them out of the country”. This is not a man who can be pushed in a direction more conducive to peace and justice. This is a man who listens to his wealthy donors, his Christian nationalist Republican allies, and himself.

Are you willing to accept a much heightened risk of nuclear war? Obviously this is hardly a Trump policy promise. But I can't think of a single president since the Cold War who is more likely to deploy nuclear weapons, given how casually he talks about wanting to use them and how erratic and unstable he can be in his dealings with foreign leaders. To quote Foreign Policy only this year, “Trump told a crowd in January that one of the reasons he needed immunity was so that he couldn’t be indicted for using nuclear weapons on a city.” That's reassuring. I'm not even in the US and I remember four years of constant background low-level terror that Trump would take offence at something some foreign leader said or think that he needs to personally intervene in some military situation to “sort it out” and decide to launch the entire world into nuclear war. No one sane on earth wants the most powerful person on the planet to be as trigger-happy and careless with human life as he is, especially if he's running the White House like a dictator with no one ever telling him no. But depending on what Americans do in November, he may well be inflicted again on all of us, and I guess we'll all just have to hope that he doesn't do the worst thing imaginable.

“But I don't want those things! Stop accusing me of supporting things I don't support!” Yes, of course you don't want those things. None of us does. No one's saying that you actively support them. No one's accusing you of wanting Black women to die from ectopic pregnancies or of wanting to throw Hispanic people in immigrant detention centres or of wanting trans people to be outlawed (unlike, I must point out, the extremely emotive and personal accusations that get thrown around about “wanting Palestinian children to die” if you encourage people to vote for Kamala).

But if you're advocating against voting for Kamala, you are clearly willing to accept them as possible consequences of your actions. That is the deal you're making. If a terrible thing happening is the clear and easily foreseeable outcome of your action (or in the case of not voting, inaction), in a way that could have been prevented by taking a different and just as easy action, you are partly responsible for that consequence. (And no, it's not “a fear campaign” to warn people about things he's said, things he wants to do, and plans drawn up by his close allies. This is not “oooh the Democrats are trying to bully you into voting for them by making him out to be really bad so you'll feel scared and vote for Kamala!” He is really bad, in obvious and documented and irrefutable ways.)

And if you believe that “both parties are the same on Gaza” (which, you know, they really aren't, but let's just pretend that they are) then presumably you accept that the horrors being committed there will continue, in the immediate term anyway, regardless of who wins the presidency. Because there really isn't some third option that will appear and do everything we want. It's going to be one of those two. And we can talk all day about wanting a better system or how unfair it is that every presidential election only ever has two viable candidates and how small the Overton window is and all that but hell, we are less than eighty days out from the election; none of that is going to get fixed between now and November. Electoral reform is a long-term (but important!) goal, not something that can be effected in the span of a couple of months by telling people online to vote third party. There is no “instant ceasefire and peace negotiation” button that we're callously overlooking by encouraging people to vote for Kamala. (My god, if there was, we would all be pressing it.)

If we're suggesting people vote for her, it's not that we “are willing to overlook genocide” or “don't care about sacrificing brown people abroad” or whatever. Nothing is being “overlooked” here. It's that we're simply not willing to accept everything else in this post and more on top of continued atrocities in Gaza. We're not willing to take Trump and his godawful far-right authoritarian agenda as an acceptable consequence of feeling like we have the moral high ground on Palestine. I cannot stress enough that if Kamala doesn't win, we - we all, in the whole world - get Trump. Are you willing to accept that?

And one more point to address: I've seen too many people act frighteningly flippant and naïve about terrible things Trump or his campaign want to do, with the idea that people will simply be able to prevent all these bad things by “organising” and “protesting” and “collective action”. “I'm not willing to accept these things; that's why I'll fight them tooth and nail every day of their administration” - OK but if you're not even willing to cast a vote then I have doubts about your ability to form “the Resistance”, which by the way would have to involve cooperation with people of lots of progressive political stripes in order to have the manpower to be effective, and if you're so committed to political purity that you view temporarily lending your support to Kamala at the ballot box as an untenable betrayal of everything you stand for then forgive me for also doubting your ability to productively cooperate with allies on the ground with whom you don't 100% agree. Plus, if the Trump campaign gets its way, American progressives would be kept so busy trying to put out about twenty different fires at once that you'd be able to accomplish very little. Maybe you get them to soften their stance on trans healthcare but oh shit, the climate policies are still in place. But more importantly, how many people do you think will protest for abortion rights if doing so means staring down a gun? Or organise to protect their neighbours from deportation if doing so means being thrown in prison yourself? And OK, maybe you're sure that you will, but history has shown us time and time again that most people won't. Most people aren't willing to face that kind of personal risk. And a tiny number of lefties willing to risk incarceration or death to protect undocumented people or trans people or whatever other groups are targeted is sadly not enough to prevent the horrors from happening. That is small fry compared to the full might of a determined state. Of course if the worst happens and Trump wins then you should do what you can to mitigate the harm; I'm not saying you shouldn't. But really the time to act is now. You have an opportunity right here to mitigate the harm and it's called “not letting him get elected”. Act now to prevent that kind of horrific authoritarian situation from developing in the first place; don't sit this one out under the naïve belief that “we'll be able to stop it if it happens”. You won't.

[monsterfucker-lisa-swallows]

I'm honestly incredibly stressed right now because I want to plan as far in advance as I can so I know what our budget is and what questions to ask the lawyer and can inform others of what we're doing so we can plan accordingly and I can get a start on paperwork and putting things together but she doesn't want to talk about any of this at all because it stresses her out. And I get it, she feels overwhelmed and it paralyzes her because she's convinced that it'll all go wrong but I can't put plans in place to help it not go wrong if she won't even talk to me about it and I'm not angry at her I just really want her to talk about what she wants so I can actually plan for it but my need for planning conflicts with her need to not think about it until later but there can't be a later if I don't even know when later is

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

WIBTA for sabotaging my boyfriend's hookup with his girlfriend by filling his sex playlist with DJ Crazytimes

I (28NB, they/he) have known my boyfriend (call him C, 29M, he/him) for some 15ish years now. As long as I've known him, he has been on and off again with his girlfriend (call him T, 29NB, he/him). Respectfully, and with love, C and T are two of the worst and most annoying people I know. I want to marry them both specifically so that I can study them under a microscope like a parasitic virus.

Technically they're monogamous, but they're both hooking up with other people (myself included), usually the same people, because they have the same taste in lovers (bad). I have suggested that they give actual polyamory a try, and they reject the idea wholeheartedly. I think they get off on their dynamic, and far be it from me to try more than the bare minimum to dissuade them from it.

A couple months back, they got into a fight and broke up (again) because T (who was unemployed at the time) stole $50 from C (who works at GameStop) so that he could pay for a tank of gas (using C's car) to go hook up with another guy a couple states over. C was not upset that T was hooking up with another guy (because he was Also hooking up with that guy and knew he would not have a leg to stand on), but because of the stolen money + car.

C and I currently live together, because you can't afford an apartment on a GameStop salary, and also, like I said, he's my boyfriend. I'm making carnitas tacos next Friday, and T is coming over, because despite everything, he has nothing else to do on a Friday night. I know that C and T are going to get into a huge fight, and I know that it's probably either going to end with them getting back together out of spite or with someone's vehicle getting keyed--I'm betting on both.

Here's where I think I might be the asshole. I would really like to get inbetween them. Not in a "I don't want you to date each other" kind of way, but in a "holy shit you are both so insufferable i would like to get in on that" kind of way. I currently have my thing with C, and I've hooked up with T once in the past, but I would really like to make it official with him as well.

My plan is as follows: C and T are going to be in the same space again next Friday. They're going to fight, then hook up, then get back together again. C is one of those cybersexual "i built my own computer and run it on Linux" people, which is to say, he thinks tiktok and youtube are evil, and he he thinks spotify premium is supporting megacorporations. So, his sex playlist for T (we do not have our own sex playlist) is just an actual folder of mp3 files.

While C is at work, I'm going to log into his computer and change several of those mp3 files to DJ Crazytimes' Planet of the Bass, which I play often, and he is frequently annoyed by. My hope is that he'll realize it was me, he'll come and yell at me for ruining their hookup, T will take my side to piss him off, and the tension will get to the point where they let me join their hookup, and I can ask to date both of them after that.

To be clear, I recognize that I'm also Incredibly Toxic for enabling and encouraging this behavior. That said, I feel like I'm justified in this scenario considering C and T are both Also toxic, and furthermore, it is a known fact that I'm dating C right now, so for them to hook up, C would technically be cheating on me. I asked C's sister (a childhood friend of mine) for her take on whether it would be funny or just annoying, and she just told me that we all deserve each other, so I think I should be good. Am I being uniquely shitty here?

What are these acronyms?

[inbabylontheywept]

the fine and subtle art of arguing with old men

it was a good week for testing which meant it was a slow week for me. most of my job is fixing the machine when it goes down. if it doesn't go down, i don't have much to do. 

fortunately neither did marc. in a site full of ornery old bastards, he's the oldest and the orneriest, so it goes without saying that i enjoy spending time with him. he reminds me of my grandpa. hell, he reminds me of a lot of people. i've befriended enough grumpy old men that i've got a sort of momentum to it now - you know how it is, when you meet someone that reminds you of someone else you really like. you get to start that friendship off half built, because you already have an idea of how to like that guy, and some of that old warmth can be brought to the new friendship. a little ember to start the stove up with.

(i think that's one of the really undersold beauties of getting older. you stop viewing people as strangers and more like remixes of friends.)

anyway, i was sitting next to marc and we were talking about the future. i've got my eye on having kids sometime soon (year or two? hopefully?), and he's very happy for me. i've tried asking him for advice, but all he says is that he didn't do a great job with his own kids and they still turned out okay, so i should stress less and trust myself more. i hope he's right. he believes it, at least, and it's a hell of a thing to have the faith of an old man. his faith is hard won.

as for his plans, he's retiring at some point in the next six months, and is hoping to sell his home and buy something in florida. he's republican, so he views the state as paradise, and i'm not inclined to even try talking him out of it. it's his dream, you know? i know for a fact my paradise would be a lot of people's hell. life's funny like that.

still, we kept going on, and it was a good time, and then he reminisced about the last time he got close to quitting - back around 2020. our job required getting vaxxed, and he refused, and there was a big kerfuffle about it before the job actually backed down. i know there's not a lot of sympathy for the unvaxxed out here, but the man's 62. you get the shot when you're under 30 to protect the people around you, but when you're over 60, you're just getting it to protect yourself and it's hard to be mad at someone for kicking their own ass. 

still gave me pause though. i knew he wasn't going to take it well, but half the job of collecting curmudgeons is keeping them around, so i said 

hey. i'm sorry they bent your arm over it, but.

but. 

you should really get that shot. 

and he looked over at me, and i looked at him, and he actually spat. not on me, just the concrete, but it was enough to show that he was mad. then he walked away, as abrupt as anything.

i felt bad about it. i wasn't sure what i'd expected, when he was willing to lose his job over it before, but i'd been so invested in his dream of retirement - the idea of him sipping margaritias on a beach next to his wife, the wife he calls every day during lunch, the wife he says is the one thing in life he ever got right on the first try. the wife that almost divorced him back when he was in the airforce because he just wasn't home enough. 

(but he can be home now.) 

and then he mentioned the vax thing, and it was like seeing a pin hit a balloon. he works out every day and takes all sorts of crazy vitamins and is generally committed to getting the most out of his pension and his life. i didn't want this dumb weak point to be his achilles heel. 

---

i wasn't actually sure how long marc would be mad at me. i've seen him stay mad at some people for weeks. i wasn't sure if being friends would make that time go up or down. 

it went down. i'm glad it went down. 

he stopped being mad about two days later. we were doing front end maintenance one morning, and it was just that simple mechanical rhythm - hex key, replace the anode sheets, punch some off-gassing holes, oil it up, put it back in - that put things at ease. it always does. people working there are too busy to remember grudges, and it has this sort of mandatory practical communication that helps smooth things over. it was going great, and then out of the blue he said babs, you gotta be careful giving advice. those shots come with complications. what would you do if i got that shot, had a stroke, and died? 

and i don't know what answer he was expecting, but i just told him the truth, which is that i would be devastated. i'd feel like i killed him. i thought that was a pretty normal response, but he looked taken aback. he asked why i said it then, and i said i'd have felt the same if he died of covid. that's just life. sometimes, there's no way forward that doesn't risk some kind of regret. 

we finished the tube after that, in a silence that felt heavier than peace but lighter than anger. it felt like the ball was back in marc's court. like it would be rude to take that turn from him. 

we parted ways with a nod and didn't speak until the next day. 

---

i was doing spreadsheet work when he found me again. standard paper engineering - thinking of things we might need and ordering them in batches, months ahead of time. it always feels a little like plugging holes in a dam with my fingers. 

but he popped up, and we didn't even exchange pleasantries. he just said i'm gonna die one day, and you can't blame yourself for that. 

which is a hell of a thing to just tell someone right off the bat. 

so i said what 

and he said babs, i am in my 60s. something is gonna get me eventually, and whether it's covid or heart disease, or a stroke, there will be something you could have said or done before. and that's okay. it's not your job to make me live forever. 

and you know, he actually made a lot of sense. so i said 

okay. 

i'll keep your business yours. i just

you were talking about your retirement before this. and i want that for you very much. you've worked hard for 45 years, and you deserve a break. we're getting to sick season, and it would be the saddest fucking thing in the world if you got this close to winning the race then tripped in the last ten feet. 

and we sat there a few moments longer. i wasn't sure what to say, and i wasn't sure what he'd say, but eventually he just shrugged and said

yeah 

then he left. i figured that would be the end of it. 

---

i did front end maintenance yesterday, after being gone a week. it's one of my favorite things to do. i like working with my hands. i really like working with my hands. i'm glad i went to college, but in a different life, i think i could've made a better electrician than an electrical engineer. 

and at one step, when we were both hoisting the plate back onto the machine, his sleeve rode up, and i saw two bandaids on his arm. 

we finished the install, and i was ready to go back when marc actually stopped me. 

i got the shot, he said, almost embarrassed. like he'd been caught. and i knew he was gonna say something dumb about it, so i just cut him off by giving him a hug. 

i was relieved. hugging old men is kind of like picking up cats. if they like you a lot, they'll tolerate it, but that's about it. we sat there maybe three beats before his hands went up, and then he gave me one overly-hard thump on the back. in my experience, this is how old men tell you that they're done, so i let him go.

carla talked me into it, he said, almost defensive. his wife. his one good decision.

tell her i said thanks, i said back.

trump got the shot too, he said, less defensive, but oddly pleading. like he was consoling himself.

like he was nervous.

then it's gotta be safe, i said, and he looked up at me, strangely searching, strangely vulnerable. i don't know exactly what he was looking for, but i guess he found it because after a few moments his shoulders relaxed.

yeah, he said, one hand on the back of his head.

it's gotta be.

[olailamajnoon]

Bruce pulled off his sweaty shirt in Ma Kent's kitchen along with Clark and Hal, and began chugging a lemonade. The three men had been doing something that apparently constituted hard manual labor in the barn. Zatanna watched silently, then she noticed it.

A tattoo on Bruce's abs. Some foreign symbols engraved in calligraphic form.

It was possible the world was coming to an end.

She turned her head to try and read it. It was Kryptonian, if she had to take a guess.

Bruce noticed where her gaze was. "My eyes are up here," he said.

"I know," said Zatanna, rolling hers. "I just...since when do you have a tattoo?"

"Since I lost a bet to my kids," said Bruce.

"You let your kids do this to you?" Zatanna was incredulous.

"It's been five years, Zee," said Clark. "Are you seriously noticing it now?"

"Well, I don't make a habit of staring at Bruce's nude form," she replied, her sentence heavy with implication.

Clark blushed and dropped his spectacles.

"What's next," said Zatanna bitterly to Bruce. "I find out you're part of a biker gang?"

"You don't become a biker with just one tattoo," said Hal. "You need an entire sleeve of them."

"Don't give him any ideas," Zatanna cautioned.

"You're overreacting," said Clark.

"The world is in a delicate state of balance," said Zatanna. "The very foundations of my existence are being rocked. I'm questioning everything I've ever known."

"I should probably start paying rent for all the space I occupy in your head," said Bruce.

"The tattoo is actually a very sweet phrase," said Clark. "In Kryptonian."

"What does it mean?"

Bruce cleared his throat and shook his head warningly at Clark. Clark grinned.

"It means," Clark said, "My soul is in two halves, and one of them belongs to you."

Bruce buried his head in his hands. Clark laughed. "Like I said. A very sweet phrase."

"You're going to suffer for this," muttered Bruce to him. "I was okay with it, as long as no one knew what it fucking meant."

"Oh stop," said Hal, grinning without shame. "Stop with the toxic masculinity. Just because you have a soppy declaration of love on your abdomen doesn't make you any less of a man." He raised his glass to Bruce in a toast.

Bruce looked at him levelly, and narrowed his eyes. "One of these days, Jordan," he growled, "you will do something, and on that day—"

"Oh, I doubt it," Hal smirked. "I think you've set the bar pretty high."

"Well," said Clark, with a cheeky grin, "Bruce learned his lesson about betting against all of his kids simultaneously, but I would say the punishment was a bit disproportionate to the crime."

Bruce was putting on his t-shirt. "Enough," he said. "No one else finds out, or I will see that you all pay."

"No one else finds out what?" asked Diana from the kitchen door, where she had evidently just arrived. Her arms were crossed against her chest. Barry and Oliver were lined up behind her, with curious expressions.

Zatanna and Hal laughed maliciously. Clark did not look displeased in the slightest.

Bruce's mouth hardened and he stalked off, muttering something about contingency plans. But no one saw the small smile that tucked itself into the corner of his mouth afterwards, when he remembered Clark's face.

Kryptonians. His fingers brushed over the tattoo. And all the ways they love to claim you.