#do you do you do you do you?

[faecaribou]

There is a crack.

Years pass and it never grows.

Your cage always changes, but the glass still keeps you trapped.

A mirror, a helmet, a screen.

The crack remains.

You reach out and feel it’s sharp edges.

You reach out and only feel glass.

No sound gets through, no wailing, no crying, no rage and no desperation.

The cage of glass is a curse,

To see through and change nothing all the same.

Hope is a fragile thing.

Your cage always changes, but remains strong

And yet,

In every iteration,

The crack remains.

So you reach out.

Please excuse the deranged tags but they will also give insight into whatever I’m going on about with this

[just-french-me-up]

'ao3 needs a like and dislike button'

what you need, my algorithm-rotten minded friend, is a grip

[podcastwizard]

hey sorry it's just that i don't think i'm very good at being a person. thanks for letting me try with you, anyway.

[bixels]

As gen-AI becomes more normalized (Chappell Roan encouraging it, grifters on the rise, young artists using it), I wanna express how I will never turn to it because it fundamentally bores me to my core. There is no reason for me to want to use gen-AI because I will never want to give up my autonomy in creating art. I never want to become reliant on an inhuman object for expression, least of all if that object is created and controlled by tech companies. I draw not because I want a drawing but because I love the process of drawing. So even in a future where everyone’s accepted it, I’m never gonna sway on this.

[gongyussy]

good thing from jp twitter this week is queen of old man yaoi michiru sonoo discovering the term old man yaoi

update: somehow it got impossibly more wholesome

quick translation: おかえり: welcome home あ 終わった 終わった: ahhh, it's over! it's done! コーヒー? お茶?: coffee? tea? コ~ヒ~ ありがと: coffee, thank you~ ネクタイレア★★ ネクタイ取るレア★★★★: seeing him with a tie on, rarity level ★★, seeing him take a tie off, rarity level ★★★★ にあうな~: it suits him~

also please do follow: AraigumaSha: sensei's twitter account marureviere: maru, who does such valuable work highlighting bl manga for an international audience

[loycos]

"You're the only one I have left..."

[cradleghost]

Oh jayce

[iiota]

refraining from a lot of election joke posting and instead I just donated $55 USD to gaza soup kitchen and i encourage anyone else to consider donating even a couple of dollars to the people who will be affected the most from whatever outcome happens

you can also donate to care for gaza here

EDIT: please also consider donating to this family their 93% to their goal!! and also please check out this post featuring more places to donate

[circumpolarvampire]

"*X country* should colonize the US! Please nuke the US!"

You all will do anything to not give us our land back huh

[phantomrose96]

You can be talking to someone and she'll be like, "Oh I made a silly mistake. Women don't deserve voting rights teehee." And you'll be like, "What." And she'll be like, "Oh I'm sorry! That must sound so bad out of context. No it's this Tiktok meme where, if you're a girl and you do something dumb, you say 'Women don't deserve voting rights teehee.'"

And you'll be like, "That sounds bad." And she'll be like, "No no. It's totally not that bad. It's just a meme. Men say it too. Like if a man does something silly he'll be like, 'I am like those women who do not deserve to vote.'" And you'll be like, "Does that make it better?" And she'll be like, "Well there was one guy who tried to make 'Men shouldn't vote' a popular meme. But it never caught on and also he got yelled at a lot."

And then you drop it there because like, you're harshing the vibe.

[mintbees]

if i was a popular minecraft youtuber id just tweet "hey guys stop drawing shipping fanart of me and my friends/coworkers, i only fucked one of them and seeing me paired with anyone else is kinda weird and crosses my boundaries" and then i'd turn my phone off

[shadesofmauve]

I want to step away from the art-vs-artist side of the Gaiman issue for a bit, and talk about, well, the rest of it. Because those emotions you're feeling would be the same without the art; the art just adds another layer.

Source: I worked with a guy who turned out to be heavily involved in an international, multi-state sex-slavery/trafficking ring.

He was really nice.

Yeah.

It hits like a dumptruck of shit. You don't feel stable in your world anymore. How could someone you interacted with, liked, also be a truly horrible person? How could your judgement be that bad? How can real people, not stylized cartoon bogeymen, be actually doing this shit?

You have to sit with the fact that you couldn't, or probably couldn't, have known. You should have no guilt as part of this horror — but guilt is almost certainly part of that mess you're feeling, because our brains do this associative thing, and somehow "I liked [the version of] the guy [that I knew]", or his creations, becomes "I made a horrible mistake and should feel guilty."

You didn't, loves, you didn't.

We're human, and we can only go by the information we have. And the information we have is only the smallest glimpse into someone else's life.

I didn't work closely with the guy I knew at work, but we chatted. He wasn't just nice; he was one of the only people outside my tiny department who seemed genuinely nice in a workplace that was rapidly becoming incredibly toxic. He loaned me a bike trainer. Occasionally he'd see me at the bus stop and give me a lift home.

Yup. I was a young woman in my twenties and rode in this guy's car. More than once.

When I tell this story that part usually makes people gasp. "You must feel so scared about what could have happened to you!" "You're so lucky nothing happened!"

No, that's not how it worked. I was never in danger. This guy targeted Korean women with little-to-no English who were coerced and powerless. A white, fluent, US citizen coworker wasn't a potential victim. I got to be a person, not prey.

Y'know that little warning bell that goes off, when you're around someone who might be a danger to you? That animal sense that says "Something is off here, watch out"?

Yeah, that doesn't ping if the preferred prey isn't around.

That's what rattled me the most about this. I liked to think of myself as willing to stand up for people with less power than me. I worked with Japanese exchange students in college and put myself bodily between them and creeps, and I sure as hell got that little alarm when some asian-schoolgirl fetishist schmoozed on them. But we were all there.

I had to learn that the alarm won't go off when the hunter isn't hunting. That it's not the solid indicator I might've thought it was. That sometimes this is what the privilege of not being prey does; it completely masks your ability to detect the horrors that are going on.

A lot of people point out that 'people like that' have amazing charisma and ability to lie and manipulate, and that's true. Anyone who's gotten away with this shit for decades is going to be way smoother than the pathetic little hangers-on I dealt with in university. But it's not just that. I seriously, deeply believe that he saw me as a person, and he did not extend personhood to his victims. We didn't have a fake coworker relationship. We had a real one. And just like I don't know the ins-and-outs of most of my coworkers lives, I had no idea that what he did on his down time was perpetrate horrors.

I know this is getting off the topic, but it's so very important. Especially as a message to cis guys: please understand that you won't recognize a creep the way you might think you will. If you're not the preferred prey, the hind-brain alarm won't go off. You have to listen to victims, not your gut feeling that the person seems perfectly nice and normal. It doesn't mean there's never a false accusation, but face the fact that it's usually real, and you don't have enough information to say otherwise.

So, yeah. It fucking sucks. Writing about this twists my insides into tense knots, and it was almost a decade ago. I was never in danger. No one I knew was hurt!

Just countless, powerless women, horrifically abused by someone who was nice to me.

You don't trust your own judgement quite the same way, after. And as utterly shitty as it is, as twisted up and unstead-in-the-world as I felt the day I found out — I don't actually think that's a bad thing.

I think we all need to question our own judgement. It makes us better people.

I don't see villains around every corner just because I knew one, once. But I do own the fact that I can't know, really know, about anyone except those closest to me. They have their own full lives. They'll go from the pinnacles of kindness to the depths of depravity — and I won't know.

It's not a failing. It's just being human. Something to remember before you slap labels on people, before you condemn them or idolize them. Think about how much you can't know, and how flawed our judgement always is.

Grieve for victims, and the feeling of betrayal. But maybe let yourself off the hook, and be a bit slower to skewer others on it.

[deseos-de-la-via-lactea]

source

[mayhemchicken-artblog]

in the hour or so it took me to draw this op turned reblogs off

EDIT: reblogs are STAYING OFF. op was right and correct and i have never regretted making a post as much as this one. if you want to reblog my art you can reblog something else from my blog. or commission me, lord knows i deserve financial compensation for the nightmare this post has put me through

[theblob1958]

people are saying do it scared, but you also gotta do it alone. you'll miss out on so much you want to do if you wait til someone will do it with you. do it scared and do it alone.