#in some fundamental way

[wordspinning]

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[spurgie-cousin]

This is such a good, succinct way of describing the illusion of choice many fundamentalist women and men have when it comes to life paths.

[wisteriasymphony]

ladrien is cool in its fuckedupness because it's so comfortably distant. they're both in their fake personas, they know the other is in their fake persona, and they're entirely willing to and enthusiastic about keeping up the charade. every interaction feels scripted and they both love this about it. there's never any danger in it because they're never required to be vulnerable whatsoever. they never have to be honest, they never have to be genuine, and they never expect the other to be genuine, and there's probably some twisted sort of comfort in knowing that the other person is never expecting you to take off their mask. that you can just lie and keep lying and it's fine

marichat is cool in its fuckedupness because it's so uncomfortably close. they both know each other so well but are unable to admit why, so they're just overly-friendly and don't have boundaries where they arguably should. there is no pretense to be civil or respectable so marichat comes with the grossest jokes and awkwardest silences and flippant displays of bad behavior. chat has no idea what proper boundaries should look like when someone isn't Using A Mask, and marinette is in no position to draw her foot in the sand* because being authoritative is for ladybug!!! so they're violating each others boundaries and making each other uncomfortable CONSTANTLY!!!

and like the others idk.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Council of lovefools.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[drenched-in-sunlight]

saying this as respectfully as possible but. Do not put fandom content creators on a pedestal. We are also just fans contributing to a community just as you are. We have boundary on our own work and that’s it. What I say is not and should not be considered sth the whole fandom should listen to. I’m just a normal ass person ranting about things on my blog. If it does not have a fandom tag for others to engage in, do not make it out to be me trying to start fights or addressing the whole community. Because it’s not.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again, my art, my lore talk, is biased. I’ve never tried to hide that I view Marika a certain way and will always develop my theory following that base assumption.

Aside from translation stuffs and pointing out in-game items, everything else I say you can look at it, agree or disagree, and move on to form your own opinions. Just because I draw stuffs doesn’t mean you get to saddle me with responsibilities about managing fandom expectations. What the hell? I’m a fan artist, I’m the last person who you should look at for “leaderism” (?) WHAT?

I can and will be a hater in my own space, like I know sometimes other artists will just post their stuffs and not engage too heavily with fandom, and for a while I did try to do that here (because I’m already a dramatic ass on twitter), that’s just not me though.

You will get art and you will get my opinions as well.

[scintillatingshortgirl19]

VERY interesting that this moment took place in the "woman in house and wilson's building thinks they're gay/dating" episode

also. hugh laurie's little smirk here really adds a certain . . . dimension to this moment that would not be there if he'd responded to the joke in a different way

[cruelplatonic]

my personal headcanon is the vees were unremarkable nobodies when they were alive. i just love it as a thematic throughline for them. they love to let the public of hell speculate on them being famed and acclaimed since before death, but the the truth is they were a d-list failed influencer that got by on cheap controversey and scamming, a broke junkie who burned every shaky bridge he ever had, and a worn-out broadcast production assistant with more rejected auditions and tossed out script pitches than he could count. nobody missed them when they were gone, nobody cared who they were until they were dead.

[anghraine]

I'm trying to redirect my political thoughts from my fandom escape blog again, but I found something interesting enough that I thought I'd talk a little about it.

Occasionally I choose suffering (looking at the more granular 2024 exit poll breakdowns rather than the summaries that I mostly don't trust much at this point). Anyway, I did find something intriguing, if not particularly surprising, in the CNN exit polls, which were done in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin with a sample size of 22,914 voters.

(I mention the specific states forming the sample because this pretty notably excludes any blue states while including some reliably Republican ones.)

Anyway, most exit polls including CNN's let respondents identify their place on the US political spectrum: conservative, moderate, or liberal (reminder that "liberal" in US usage can be a pejorative for "less leftist than me" but also a shorthand for "radical leftist" but also for "anyone who doesn't seek a cishet white Christian ethnostate", but also can be a more neutral synonym for progressives and/or leftists and is often used that way, as here). So you can look at the election results for each of these ideological factions and what share of the overall sample size they represent.

The interesting thing: this "liberal" category accounted for very similar proportions to 2020 of the overall vote in the sample (24% in 2020, 23% in 2024—a difference well within the margin of error of exit polling). There is no need to explain liberals/leftists staying home in 2024: at least in terms of proportions of the overall electorate, they didn't. Just under 1/4 of voters in 2024 were liberals or leftists, just as in 2020.

Okay, if the most leftwards faction of the US political spectrum actually formed a similar proportion of the electorate, then who did they vote for?

Harris. In CNN's own exit polls from 2020, 89% of this faction voted for Biden, and (surprisingly!) a full 10% voted for Trump. God knows what motivated that 10% Trump share after four years of his hellscape of an administration at the height of COVID, but in any case, that support cratered in 2024. 91% of this group voted for Harris and only 4% for Trump. It's an estimate, but it looks like these very peculiar Trump voters had enough of him in 2024 and around half either voted third party this time or for Harris.

So which faction is Trump's victory coming from? Further consolidation of the far right?

In part, yes! 90% of conservatives voted for Trump in 2024, vs 85% in 2020—likely, some conservatives who voted third party or even for Biden in 2020 came "home" this year. However, conservative turnout was actually a little down in 2024, proportionally speaking: conservatives dropped from 38% of the sample in 2020 to 34% in 2024.

But there's one more major faction in all this: "moderates" or centrists. To be clear, we're talking about the US version of centrism, given that this is a US organization polling US voters about US politicians, not "Bernie would be center-right in Denmark" or whatever. This moderate faction jumped from 38% of the overall sample in 2020 to 42% in 2024, and they swung hard towards Trump, though Harris still won a plurality of them. In 2020, 64% of moderates voted for Biden vs 34% for Trump. In 2024, 57% of them voted for Harris vs 40% for Trump—that is, the Democratic lead among centrists dropped precipitously from +30 to +17.

Tl;dr—ideologically speaking, this data suggests that Trump owes his victory to gains among both right-wing and centrist voters rather than some faction of would-be leftists or progressives apathetically staying home or voting third-party or otherwise deserting Democrats (because they're insufficiently radical or for any other reason).

Oh, and if you're curious as to how this compares to CNN's 2016 exit polls, I also checked those! Harris's 84-point lead among the most leftwards faction is a significant improvement from HRC's 74-point lead in 2016. Trump also got 10% of that group in 2016, as in 2020, so it's this campaign—not Hillary's or Biden's—that managed to eat into whatever the hell is going on with that group.

Harris's +17 with moderates is actually a slight improvement on Hillary's +12 in 2016. Biden's jump to a +30 lead among centrists in 2020 represented either a backlash against Trump from centrists, or Biden's own rapport with that group, or some mysterious issue some of those voters had with both HRC and Harris (I wonder what it could be!!), or some combination thereof. Regardless, there are a lot of actual ideologically centrist voters in the USA and not just would-be leftists who haven't heard the good news of Marx yet. And Trump has an iron grip on the right wing at this point: he beat Hillary with conservatives by +65 in 2016, then beat Biden with an even larger margin of +71, then leapt to a 81-point lead over Harris with right-wing voters this year.

[bonesandthebees]

sigh feeling nostalgic for my old fics/the old community these days. I miss it man.

[sabotourist]

restoration is still my favorite season...

[stormyrainyday]

apologies this is far from a coherent shower thought but i think it's time we like. decided to detach our identity a bit from the things we do. it's fine to just read. you don't have to be a reader. it's fine to just game. you don't have to be a gamer. you can be those things but i feel like in a quest to find ourselves and open our hearts, especially to others online (because i know, the first thing we do when on a new platform is say hi im [name] i like these things we should talk, i know, i do, my pinned post is literally that), i feel like we forget that we are more than the things we do and even the things we love. we, to borrow words from slay the princess, contain it in our multitudes.

it's a sentiment i've felt for a long time as someone who has been on the internet and in fandom spaces for a good decade now, and like. i find when we hold these things so close that they become us, we become too defensive over them. how many minor fandom disagreements spiral into threats, name calling, doxxing even? i find, especially younger users in fan spaces, tend to take even small differences of opinion and take them personally. saw someone blow up and call people awful names over believing only one person could top in a genshin ship. another left a server i was in because they disliked a popular character, and other (respectfully), decided to share why they did like her. i get that things like rejection sensitivity are a thing, but i think this failure to recognize the self as an entity apart from the things you do and the thoughts you have definitely contribute to this. phenomenon i suppose.

it's genuinely slay the princess that has given me the vocabulary to express and understand this thing i was already thinking. i think, though we are not gods, it's important to understand that we are not things so easily defined. we consist of our thoughts, our actions, our perceptions, our beliefs, and more. even the outside world's perception of us reflects some part of our nature. but not all of it. it's impossible to define oneself in one, two, three words or even an essay.

because like we don't exist in a vacuum. part of our existence is defined in our interactions with others. but not all. never all. there is no one who can truly know you, and we cannot truly know ourselves. our principles bend to the whims of circumstance no matter what we tell ourselves otherwise, so we can't decide what we are or what we would be in a situation for sure, ever. and that's not a bad thing, but if we can't ever truly know ourselves, then how can we assign such great importance to something as superficial as the things we enjoy sometimes?

we are both a constant and the capacity to change. and to take just a handful of things and call it your identity, even subconsciously, is a disservice to the self. in an effort to be seen we break ourselves down into easy (i hate to say it but) marketable pieces.

take being a reader for example. it has always felt like vague slang for booksmart, thoughtful, likely quiet and introverted as well, just as much as it means "i like to read books". theres an aesthetic to it involved, and a whole subculture. do you write in your books? do you keep them museum-fresh quality? do you read smut or classics or high fantasy or satire and what does it say about you? if you say audiobooks aren't real literature, are you signalling to others about quality and sophistication, or are you a pretentious asshole, and ableist to boot? these connotations assigned to such an otherwise benign thing about someone are i think are reflective of the construct of identity and perception. i could go on about it in a way that's more coherent but i, a student, have other things to do right now.

(does being a student make me intelligent? does it impress you to know i study medicine? what if i told you i average Cs in my classes? what if i told you i dislike patient care? what if i told you i'm not here for the money OR to make the world a better place, and that i'm here purely to serve my curiosities about the way the body functions and to absolve my obsessive need to understand just what are we? does this change what you think of me? does it matter? what if you knew the guilt i felt for seeing so much suffering, but still hating patient care enough to worry endlessly about being stuck in it as a career? am i better for it? but i have not acted on this guilt. it is a mere feeling that only i know. knew. is it different now that i've confessed it? does it matter? does any of it change who i am, fundamentally? or am i a thing detached from it all? or. as i like to believe. is it both? your shifting perceptions of me and the way i change shape and form (so much like our beloved princess in slay the princess) in your eyes, they make up me just as much as the soul or the self or whatever other philosophical name you assign to it. at the end of the day, isn't the most important thing that i am just me? both devoid of and constituted of the sum of my parts? what is found in the spaces between my cells? impulses and chemicals. is that me? is it all me? can i ever really know it? and why, why, why define it at all?)

[uncanny-tranny]

"haha, are you an art gay, a science gay, or a math gay"

Actually, I find the division between art, science, and math to be a very nebulous idea and useless when you actually interact with the universe. The more you learn about the world, the more you surround yourself with art and science and math, and you'll never be able to see it any other way and it will be beautiful. When I take your hand, it won't be the science of our atoms closing the distance between us that we will experience, but the math of our fingers interlocking and the art of our bodies that we will experience. You are math and you are science and you are art, and nothing will make you any lesser💛

[youngpettyqueen]

I need to talk about Julian's whole thing with Sloan in Extreme Measures cause it does actually make me feel a certain kind of rabid

Extreme Measures is a great episode for the Julian/Miles dynamic and has a lot of great moments with them but I think an underrated element of the episode is how it very plainly shows just how much the Dominion War has changed Julian, and how his morals have shifted into a much greyer area

Julian in this episode is very callous towards Sloan even as he's literally dying. he has no issues violating Sloan's mind, and when Sloan dies, the only reason he actually cares is because the answers and secrets Sloan has will die with him. truly cannot emphasize enough just how deeply Julian fucking hates Sloan, and sheer hatred isnt something we really see all that much from Julian, especially not to the degree he was with Sloan

even with that, though, Julian has never been like that with another patient. Julian doesnt let his personal feelings get in the way of being a doctor, and always treats his patients with the utmost care and his best work. Julian was willing to find a cure for the Jem'Hadar's addiction, simply because they asked for help, even if it meant potentially making them into a much bigger threat than they already were. Julian treated Tain in Camp 371. and, sure, Julian does treat Sloan, but he does so explicitly because Sloan has information they need, not because he has any care for Sloan's life

and I think that- his willingness to violate Sloan's mind to get what they need, and how he didn't particularly care that Sloan died- is a really bleak look at just how much the war has changed Julian and how much it's shifted his moral compass. throughout the war, Julian has been ordered time and time again to compromise his morals. add to that several traumatic events- multiple of which are orchestrated by Sloan- and a slide into deep depression, and it's no wonder he gets to a point where he can do the things he does in this episode

and I dont think it hits him until much later. I think one day, long after the war has ended and theyre still rebuilding everything that was broken, Julian lays awake at night and remembers how bad it got and what he became willing to do, and it makes him sick to his stomach

[naamahdarling]

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[chamerionwrites]

Intellectually I understand where people are coming from, but personally I do THE biggest double take every time someone boils down conservative Christian ideology (and/or secularized cultural reflections thereof) to a kind of dour puritanism that proclaims happiness is sin/suffering is a moral good/everyone should be miserable all the time. Like I get it! I do. But also, institutionally, I have never met a group of more passionate worshippers and vicious defenders of their own comfort than evangelical Christians. There is a reason the common thread between my various weird triggers more or less boils down to "toxic positivity." There is a REASON my exvangelical tag is #walking away from omelas.

[thegreatyin]

everyone who says arknights stories are bad because they're too long or too wordy has a huge skill issue. god forbid there are Words in my Visual Novel. this is one of many reasons why the subreddit is dead to me