#isn't it a little bit dangerous

[uncanny-tranny]

I think so many people are so deeply alienated from themselves that they have no clue how to exercise their free will and autonomy. For some, this alienation runs so deep that they are afraid of their own autonomy and humanity. It is completely understandable why one would have those feelings, but it can be worrisome.

I want to help others who feel this way, so here are small things I have done to exercise my free will:

Add "guilty pleasure" songs to playlists and actually listen to them (I have a ton of late 1990s-early 2000s music I listen to now proudly that I never listened to in the past out of shame)

Getting the décor item, bath set, bed spread, ect. in the patterns you like, even if it's "childish" (I got a dinosaur-themed wastebasket from the kids' décor section and I adore it)

Taking a new route to get to a place you go to often

Eat dessert first

Celebrate well, and often

Collect things that are "odd" or don't seem like an "acceptable" thing to collect (somebody on my "for you" page collects dandelion crayola crayons and it was so cool!!!!!!)

Incorporate one new piece in an outfit you wear frequently (e.g., a new chain, a necklace, ribbons, bracelets, ect.). Challenge yourself to add onto the outfits if you feel up for it.

Sing along to songs without worrying that you sound "good" or your intonation is completely accurate

Read a book from a genre you weren't allowed to read as a kid (comics, thrillers, mysteries, anything!)

Walk without having a specific destination or goal

Pick up a new craft without expecting yourself to master it or to ever be "good" enough. Get your hands messy.

I don't want to shame anybody for not feeling as though they have free will or that they are exempt from exercising it. However, I wanted to give ideas so that you might read this list and find your own ways to express your intrinsic autonomy and will. You deserve to be a person, to feel alive, not just living. That is what our lives are for.

[nmotypdfsfg]

[kazanskyy]

iceman + his concern for maverick post-hop 31

[bumblingbabooshka]

[Tuvok & Janeway: Control, Distance, Duty & Connection.] Sources: St Voyager Transcripts / Mitski 'First Love Late Spring' / Disco Elysium

[invinciblerodent]

i think in my dragon age excitement, i full-on forgot just how stinking handsome this asshole is

(also, help, i think i accidentally made him cuter than he has any right to be, and not only in the appearance department)

[pumpkinrootbeer]

sorry for haymitch posting constantly but the funniest thing to me is in his games there was nothing outwardly suggesting everything was poison but his paranoid ass saw fresh water and went "it's a trap" and the hilarious part is he was right

[molagboop]

What would people actually like to see from my Patreon? I've hit a bit of a wall IRL and want to implement more incentives for folks to join, but I also don't want to offer something that no one's interested in.

I'm mostly doing my own thing, and have considered selling merch, but there's also that anxiety associated with interest/cost of production. I have decent skill in ceramic work, so if I had geographically convenient access to a kiln, I'd be able to do more with that. I miss working with clay and could never get into the polymer stuff.

This isn't like a life or death situation: I'm not exactly well off financially, but the straits aren't horrifically dire yet. I have a decent living situation: the folks here are great. Patreon and Ko-fi are mostly something I do on the side at the moment, but if y'all have any suggestions, I'll look into providing it.

[tbcanary]

(GA Vol 7 #2 (2023) & BOP #1 (2023))

he got it from his mama <3

[abyssembraced]

Making You the Patron Saint of Something

Patron Saint of Creation

Patron saint of explosions. Patron saint of More. Patron saint of something new entirely. Something unfamiliar, something you can't recognize. Was Frankenstein's monster an abomination or had his like just never been seen before? You're the patron saint of all those new, beautiful things. You're the patron saint of the monsters, too.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Patron Saint of Bones

Patron saint of frameworks. Of structures. Of solidity. Patron saint of things that break. Patron saint of things that are left behind. The bones survive long after the body, the building: what is there left for them, when the rest is gone? What do bones do, with nothing to hold around them? Who holds the bones?

~~~~~~~~~~~

Tagged by: @distrxst (thank you!)

Tagging: Back at it again with tagging Everyone <3 And again, if you have multiple rp blogs, absolutely feel free to do it for one other than the one I tagged!! @bladesfromthedark , @legalbrats , @tazmilyxfamily , @pri-rp , @hopeful-hugz , @quillheel , @musescfmusic , @interdimensional-ship

[chaos-in-bright-pink-hair-dye]

Oh also the Girl has a friendship bracelet that the fab four made for her with all four of their respective colours and thin strands of their hair braided into it :)

[ru5t]

//> what kind of herb are you?

Mint — The world is a puzzle, so complex and multifaceted that you long to run your hands through the tapestry of its wonders and stay there forever, lost in the threads and colors and stories. You wish to stay there forever and you tell yourself it's to know the world but maybe it's not, maybe it's a fear that you're not enough, that you're so fragile and helpless in a world that moves too fast, too sharply, too many bright, painful colors that you stay locked inside your mind and thoughts, where you decide the tempo of your world, where you can grow and be as competent, as capable as you want, where the world is as wide as you can imagine it and never out of control unless you want it to be. Your shield is your knowledge, your mind, and you never feel ready enough for the world around you, never feel prepared enough, never safe, and you wonder if things could have been different, if you could have been better, happier, more like everyone else if you'd just known what you know now.

[bixels]

My older sister gave me some really good advice when I was first learning how to drive and would feel stressed or anxious when I'm driving slower than someone behind me on a one-lane street, or when there's someone waiting on me to make a right turn:

Nobody can make you do anything when you're in a car. They can get impatient or annoyed or even honk at you, but the chances of them getting out and berating you is slim to none. And even then, they can't make you move until you feel safe and ready to.

So for anyone with social anxiety who feels awful whenever they're "underperforming" on the road and holding other people up: your safety matters more than their convenience. If you don't feel safe or comfortable, you are not obligated to put your car into motion, even when pressured. You are not being selfish, you are being responsible. If you can easily get out of the way of others, do so. If you can't, fuck them for honking at you for driving at a safe speed, or making sure there's no oncoming traffic before merging or turning right.

I am BEGGING younger drivers. drive carefully. give yourself room. for fuck's sake use your turn signals and don't fucking weave thru traffic. this is not a video game, this is real life and if you get into an accident, you could get killed or kill someone else VERY easily

[mortalityplays]

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

[peliginspeaks]

Finding it funny how little I've used Hallowrove as a jumping off point for connections to my other characters, in spite of how well connected he generally is. The rest of you guys are out here doing complex relationships between your alt characters but no, with me you get one guy and another guy who's met them three times and exchanged maybe two words (and more blows than words) across all three interactions, and then a third one who's got no idea who either of those two weirdos are because she's too busy Not Being in the Adulterine Castle, as one does. RIP to anyone who wanted easy pick to draw together for Artfight, you'll have to go looking elsewhere lol

[iniziare]

Tag drop: Kafka