#but I been way too scared to try

[lightgriffinsect]

we are attempting chai with rusk after 3 days of eating nothing but jelly and khichdi, wish me luck fellas hopefully I can digest this one

[mossy-aro]

ultimately i think my insistence on aro positivity honestly is as much a political stance as a personal one.

when i say aro positivity is crucial and that i dislike doomer-ist posts that express sentiments like 'I hate being aro so much I wish I was dead instead’ it's not because I don’t think there can and should be a space for negativity and acknowledging self-hate, or the many ways being aromantic can really suck sometimes. i find that to be very important!

that being said. there is smth here about how self-hate posts are sometimes just arophobia that we inflict on ourselves. and when we put that out into the ether it (intentionally or not) can become arophobia that we inflict on other members of the community. i think there absolutely needs to be a place for negativity and the expression of anger and frustration and self loathing even - these are all good things to talk about because these are things that we experience. that being said, it can also be genuinely upsetting and triggering to people to have what is essentially arophobia shown to them and then have that be validated by other aspec people. your personal thoughts can affect your wider community on a level you may not anticipate. and i understand it i truly do! it took me so long to be able to recover from accepting being aroace - it threw my entire world off kilter and made me question everything about my place in the world.

but my insistence on aro joy and positivity is because ultimately i do believe that building is at the core essence of it all. that ultimately discussions and the purpose of community should be about construction, not destruction. and this is both a personal and a political stance. talking about how much you hate yourself and cultivating online discussions/spaces where negativity about aspec identity is the main and only theme is destructive - if that’s where we let the conversation end. these thoughts can and should be used as a vehicle to look for a path forward!

joy and positivity create a space where the focus can become on forging a path forward, on construction, on community building instead of tearing ourselves and others down with negative thoughts. it’s not productive or healthy when it stops at a place of negativity - it becomes actively destructive to the essence of community.

and i do think that this is especially poignant considering the fact that being any kind of queer, but especially aromantic (and/or asexual) means forging a path for yourself and making your own happiness where there is no obvious way forward. our communities exist mostly online (right now, anyway), there is little recognition of our existence in the real world, the effects of amatonormativity are both pervasive and actively dehumanising, and there are legal, economic and social structures in place actively making our lives more difficult. yes that all sucks! it’s good to acknowledge that. we need to in order to change it. but more importantly, that’s not the end. we are still here and our happiness, our future is for us to determine. even if we can’t change the laws or society, loving yourself and understanding aromanticism as a political identity (as well as personal), as a radical worldview, and as a protest against amatonormativity is essential for both community and personal well being. the personal is political.

tldr. i guess my point is that as a community, we should focus on building, improving, and nurturing ourselves and each other (construction) as opposed to destruction. we should recognise aromanticism and asexuality as political identities as well as personal ones and rely on community and self-love in the absence of anything else as a form of protest and political power. destruction (the recognition of everything that is wrong) is essential as a starting point - but where do we go from there? we rebuild.

[kyonshi-8610]

a realization i had about a month ago

[dykedvonte]

Do you have anything you've been thinking on but just haven't made a post about it yet? Also I'm really enjoying your fic!

I have a few things but it's likely mostly headcanons that I consider somewhat disconnected from my analysis.

Curly's parents had him old, only child, died shortly after he graduated and got the pony express position. It was the last big thing they saw him do which is a reason he stayed for so long.

Doesn't admit how much their death affected him

Jimmy has a largish family. One of the cases of too many kids to keep tract of, parent never really noticed any of them nor their behaviors

Anya lived in a lot of houses growing up, regular supportive family that just struggled to support themselves.

Became a nurse largely to avoid their financial struggles but mostly because she felt too many people weren't being cared for and advocated for in the world properly

Swansea likes high top sneakers most. Likes how snug they fit and how they shield his ankles at work

Curly has a bit of a caffeine problem since he can’t sleep. Can occasionally be found wandering the ship at “night” when he had some too late or just couldn’t sleep.

Daisuke knows a little about a lot of things. Starts conversations with “did you know” a lot but please don’t ask him deeper questions

Curly has known Jimmy longer but has worked with Anya and Swansea longer, met them during his middle years, met Jimmy shortly before college.

Swansea rents a house, Daisuke’s family lives in a big nice apartment, Curly has a condo, Anya live in a small one bedroom apartment and Jimmy has a studio.

Curly's home is very disconcerting. It's too normal to a like uncanny degree.

Anya is ambidextrous but prefers her left.

Anya and Curly are both not native English speakers so occasionally they forget words and bond over the mutual mocking they get from the rest of the crew. Daisuke knows some Japanese but is still learning, never picked it up as a kid

Only Swansea and Daisuke know how to drive, Earth in my mind is very post capitalist so only older people and like the extremely wealthy can afford cars.

It's also like walkable just due to how many businesses are in your face. Probably strict living vs shopping districts

I have more but the way that I headcanon about them is like too long.

[cloudysarts]

this show would be good if literally everything about it was different

[stupid-elf]

Growing up with strict, neurodivergent parents while neurodivergent yourself will have you as an adult acting like you've recently escaped the feywild. What are the tricky rules? Is everything accounted for? How do I ensure I don't accidentally step over the line into Impoliteness. You know the consequences aren't death and dismemberment but you might look down one day and find you've lost your shadow and all of your friends if you're not careful

[ganondoodle]

i cant lie, im also beating myself up about not being able to get excited for the new game, or anything anymore it seems, while it can be fun to criticise things, some things you just dont like so badly that the frustration knowing it could be so much better but isnt and you not able to change it outweighs any fun- i dont like being a 'hater', i hate totk, but not bc i hate zelda but bc i LOVE it and want it to be better (though im starting to doubt my ability to do anything good with it too..)

and with the new game trailer (like, i still hope its better than im fearing rn) i feel similarly as when the next totk trailers dropped after the first one (which DID excite me), all of them gave me a sense of dread bc it seemed to go into a direction i wouldnt like, i tried to tone that voice down to enjoy the game, but then .. i was right

i dont want to be an annoying complainer about everything new, but maybe i am and i dont like that thought, i dont want to spoil anyones fun, i want to partake in it :(

[pinkfestivalpeanuttree]

oughhhh... what if... kinger and queenie were married before they arrived in the circus and once their memories started degrading, each other was all they had left of their life before the circus... or what if they were dating before and they got married in the circus... them being able to hold on even though everything felt pointless because of each other... also i know caine would have had a field day with a wedding in the circus. WHAT IF... queenie was the one who told kinger that things wouldn't be pointless as long as they had each other, and as long as he had people who cared about him.. and he passed that message along to pomni .. something something people living on in the little kindnesses that impact others, living on in memories and in legacy....

[candidateofloyalty]

Franziska’s insistence on perfection is an attempt to live up to her father’s legacy despite that legacy being built on lies and ruining countless lives including that of the person Franziska loves most. Accepting that she is not and cannot be perfect is a major step in her development into not only a better person but a happier one. And despite all of this, every time she declares her own perfection my immediate impulse is to agree with her

[persy-r-bozo]

[naamahdarling]

.

[puppyeared]

if escape rooms as team building exercises became popular im not sure if id be more excited or terrified

[strwbrryvagabond]

wanted to get on here and yap about American Girl for some reason today

I'm far from a brand loyalist, and honestly, I was shocked I didn't grow up with the off-brand dolls you could get at Walmart or Target since I grew up poor until recently when my mom informed me that I would save money up for months and months at a time so that I could buy the dolls, and my parents only even actually purchased one for my birthday once we started to do a bit better financially, and after they saw how much I loved and took care of the dolls

I bought accessories for them myself as well, both from the actual company and from other brands like Target and Walmart ones, and even paid my mom to order me a bunk bed for them off of Etsy or something because I was so distraught that they didn't all have their own beds.

Anyways, I know brands are bad and stuff, and American Girl is not without faults and controversies, but tbh those dolls really shaped me as a kid, like I intentionally bought Rebecca Rubin as my first doll when I was a kid after seeing her in a catalog that we got sent by mistake because she was Jewish and looked like me. I had never seen a doll or character, or pretty much anything at that age who was Jewish like me and looked like me, and she wanted to be an actress, and at the time, I also wanted to act

I took that doll very literally everywhere, half the pictures of me from that age, she's tucked under my arm in a different outfit, her hair as well taken care of as I could manage for being so little. I accidentally messed up one of her curls while trying to fix her hair, and I cried for like a solid half an hour until my mom helped me fix it. even after I got other dolls, all of which I still loved and took care of religiously, Rebecca was the one who came everywhere with me

I'd already been a big reader before that, which is a whole other post, but I devoured those books, and I totally blame them for my current love of learning history and historical fiction. and the different dolls were all depicted as activists and feminists, and do not get me wrong here (I say on the 'taking things out of context' website) they were far from perfect with their diversity and activism, like oh jeez they did some very questionable things sometimes, but for the early 2000s and 2010s? revolutionary

the store closest to me closed a little before my birthday last year. I didn't know that it was even happening, and honestly probably still wouldn't have known if I hadn't been shopping with my friends at that mall like two weeks before my birthday since that was the only day we could all make work. Despite not having touched my dolls in a while, everything was super on sale, and I had been planning on taking Rebecca to college with me, so I figured I might buy her an outfit or something.

while the store was pretty ransacked, I was shocked and, no joke, teary-eyed over how many things they had for different cultures, different religions, and how many little girls I saw in there with big starry eyes looking at a doll that looked like them

I ended up buying a Channukkah outfit, and one of the friends I was with convinced me to, against my nature, let them buy a Lunar New Year outfit for me as well, which almost made me cry again. What really did it was seeing one of the previous Girls of the Year, Corrine Tan. Oh my gosh if they had had her when I was a little girl, she would've gone right beside Rebecca with how obsessed I was with her. I don't think I've mentioned it here before, but as a kid, I LOVED Mulan, and when I went to Disney World and the dress up boutique they had, I was DEVASTATED that they didn't have a Mulan costume. I latched onto her so hard for a very similar reason that I latched onto Rebecca so hard; because even though she wasn't the same ethnicity as me, Mulan was Asian, and so am I. I wore out I think three burned copies of that movie I watched it so often

I'm just weirdly sadder than I expected that American Girl is closing so many stores and not making as many sales I guess. I'm really fighting being a brand loyalist right now, because there are about a million other brands that make super similar dolls that I'm sure little kids all over loved, it's just always stuck with me that they at least seem to care about representation in the stories they make for these dolls

I mean, it clearly impacted me growing up, and I think it was for the better. I remember reading Addy's book being one of the first times I was exposed to the idea of children being slaves because they obviously didn't talk about that in an elementary school in the 2010s. I really just wanted to get all of my thoughts out, I've been thinking about it a lot recently since I took Rebecca to college, and I've now been hearing stories from girls who see her in my room about what doll or what toy shaped them as a child. Very excited to dress her up for Channukkah when it comes around, and tbh I've been looking for more outfits for her online. I just want her to be something I take with me throughout my life I guess. I mean, I took her everywhere when I was little, so it kinda feels wrong not to take her with me on this super big part of my life.

yeah anyways uh, if you had one of these dolls go... idk kiss em on the forehead or something. remind the toys that shaped you that you love them for what they did for you and all that. yap session over

[buddiebitch]

opinions on Tommy

sorry i just like posting polls

[hella1975]

all hate to tiktok for taking 'having a space to more openly and actively talk about different cultures' to mean 'cultures are NOT to be shared and we must be vigilantly defensive of our cultures for fear of appropriation, a word that can be applied to any multicultural interaction'. like of course cultural appropriation is a very real problem but ive seen with the access to global multicultural conversation that tiktok provides it's made people TERRIFIED to even interact with cultures other than their own for fear of 'doing it wrong'. like at some point you have to acknowledge that in the real world of the great outdoors, the majority of people are eager to SHARE their cultures. yes there are ignorant questions and biases but also... how do you think those things get unlearnt? i dont understand how deciding that multiculturalism is an elephant in the room instead of a normal thing that should just be talked about and lived with is supposed to benefit anyone? and kids on tiktok are CONVINCED that it's a time bomb of a conversation to have and therefore must be avoided at all costs but like. people generally LOVE their home and their culture and are PROUD of it and want to share it. how have we made it so that showing genuine interest and a desire to understand something so integral to a person's identity is now feared and borderline demonised?

[best-enemies]

I've reached season 5 on my CSI rewatch and I'm a few episodes past "Swap Meet", where a woman is murdered after attending a swing party with other couples from the neighbourhood. Near the end of the episode there's a moment that made me jump from my seat:

(Grissom walks up to Sara and takes the seat next to her. He's holding two cups. He hands her a cup of tea.)

[INT. POLICE DEPARTMENT - BRASS' OFFICE]

Erin Brady: Everybody fantasizes about other people. (She glances at Grissom.)

Even you, Mr. Grissom. A neighbor, a friend ... girl at the office.

[INT. POLICE DEPARTMENT - HALLWAY]

(The door opens. Paul Brady walks out of the hallway. Erin Brady walks out into the hallway. Sara is sitting in the hallway chair watching them. She watches as they meet and kiss.)

(Grissom walks up to Sara and takes the seat next to her. He's holding two culps. He hands her a cup of tea.)

LIKE!!!!!!!

Right after Erin ends her sentence with 'girl at the office', the first time Sara and Grissom meet again, he brings her tea. This might be an innocent interaction but to me it seemed like a nod to this relationship they have where both are into each other, know about the other's feelings, but can't/won't do anything about it (although Sara has kind of given Grissom an ultimatum). I don't know if it was intentional - I'm guessing it is, because I picked it up immediately. I might or might not have squealed in delight.