#just ready to talk about how i feel

[inkskinned]

because sometimes there are invisible tests and invisible rules and you're just supposed to ... know the rule. someone you thought of as a friend asks you for book recommendations, so you give her a list of like 30 books, each with a brief blurb and why you like it. later, you find out she screenshotted the list and send it out to a group chat with the note: what an absolute freak can you believe this. you saw the responses: emojis where people are rolling over laughing. too much and obsessive and actually kind of creepy in the comments. you thought you'd been doing the right thing. she'd asked, right? an invisible rule: this is what happens when you get too excited.

you aren't supposed to laugh at your own jokes, so you don't, but then you're too serious. you're not supposed to be too loud, but then people say you're too quiet. you aren't supposed to get passionate about things, but then you're shy, boring. you aren't supposed to talk too much, but then people are mad when you're not good at replying.

you fold yourself into a prettier paper crane. since you never know what is "selfish" and what is "charity," you give yourself over, fully. you'd rather be empty and over-generous - you'd rather eat your own boundaries than have even one person believe that you're mean. since you don't know what the thing is that will make them hate you, you simply scrub yourself clean of any form of roughness. if you are perfect and smiling and funny, they can love you. if you are always there for them and never admit what's happening and never mention your past and never make them uncomfortable - you can make up for it. you can earn it.

don't fuck up. they're all testing you, always. they're tolerating you. whatever secret club happened, over a summer somewhere - during some activity you didn't get to attend - everyone else just... figured it out. like they got some kind of award or examination that allowed them to know how-to-be-normal. how to fit. and for the rest of your life, you've been playing catch-up. you've been trying to prove that - haha! you get it! that the joke they're telling, the people they are, the manual they got- yeah, you've totally read it.

if you can just divide yourself in two - the lovable one, and the one that is you - you can do this. you can walk the line. they can laugh and accept you. if you are always-balanced, never burdensome, a delight to have in class, champagne and glittering and never gawky or florescent or god-forbid cringe: you can get away with it.

you stare at your therapist, whom you can make jokes with, and who laughs at your jokes, because you are so fucking good at people-pleasing. you smile at her, and she asks you how you're doing, and you automatically say i'm good, thanks, how are you? while the answer swims somewhere in your little lizard brain:

how long have you been doing this now? mastering the art of your body and mind like you're piloting a puppet. has it worked? what do you mean that all you feel is... just exhausted. pick yourself up, the tightrope has no net. after all, you're cheating, somehow, but nobody seems to know you actually flunked the test. it's working!

aren't you happy yet?

[babybearnini]

I feel so upset like I'm gonna go home and cry under the blankets and dry heave

[vanityangel]

SOLO SIKOA WWE BACKLASH (MAY 10, 2025)

[wildstar25]

WolShtola Week 2025 - Day Six - Angst

Waiting.

[scificrows]

Okay, my brain refuses to think about anything other than Murderbot, so I looked at every use of the word "friend[s]" in TMBD and... created some pie charts. Normal human activities.

Some Thoughts™ I had while putting this together (under the cut):

In All Systems Red, Murderbot notes that the PresAux crew are all close friends (twice! and goes on to explain their internal relationships which I think is very cute). This is pretty much the only use of 'friends' in ASR, except for when Murderbot says that SecUnits can't be friends with each other.

It seems that this may be one of the first times Murderbot has ever really been around a group of friends before? Murderbot notes that this is not the norm for its contracts and admits that the fact that they are all friends and the way they interact with each other make it actually enjoy that contract (before!!!! the hostile attack, so it already enjoys this contract before they start seeing it as a person etc ghghhhh). [Inference: Friendship seems enjoyable.]

The first character that calls Murderbot its friend is ART in Artificial Condition. Murderbot immediately refutes this (and then goes on to call ART its friend to its clients for the rest of the book). [Inference: Maybe ART is Murderbot's friend. And maybe that is... agreeable]

Rogue Protocol has more than twice as many instances of the word 'friend' as any of the other novellas. Why? Miki. Friendship and its implications for non-humans are a central theme because Miki is friends with everyone. Murderbot initially scoffs at the notion that Miki and Miki's humans are friends. At the end of the book, after witnessing how desperately Don Abene tried to stop Miki from trying to save them, and her grief after its death, Murderbot has to admit that she had in fact been Miki's friend. [Inference: Humans can be friends with bots and can sincerely care about them]

In Exit Strategy, Murderbot tentatively uses the word "friends" for its humans for the first time (several times actually). It questions whether it can actually call them its friends or not and later realizes that it had been afraid what admitting that the humans are its friends would do to it. At the end of the book, Mensah tells Murderbot the PresAux crew are its friends, which is the first time a human has directly said that to it (at least on-page). [Inference: Humans can and want to be Murderbot's friends]

In Network Effect, Murderbot seems to be more habituated to the word 'friend', confidently calling ART and Ratthi its friends, like it is no longer just trying the concept on unsure if it fits. There are many instances in which other characters refer to MB as ART's friend or the other way around and Murderbot's humans refer to Murderbot as their friend several times. Generally, there seems to be less hesitancy, because yes, all of them are Murderbot's friends, why wouldn't they be. [Inference: SecUnits can have friends. This SecUnit has friends. They care about it a lot.]

Conclusion: The Murderbot Diaries tell the story of a construct that does not seem to consider the possibility of friendship for itself and is fine with that - until it accidentally starts caring a little too much and suddenly more and more people annex it as a friend (ew) to the point where it can no longer deny that this is happening and has to begrudgingly admit that yes, it has friends now and maybe that is actually not a bad thing.

[dollypopup]

I just need every single person in this fandom who has ever been mean about Luke Newton to know that Nicola Coughlan hates you. Genuinely and wholeheartedly.

She hates you. Sure, she won't say it aloud, because she's a professional who knows her career lives or dies by fans, but please know that she does. She hates you if you've said Colin gave you the ick, especially so if you said it to Luke, she hates you if you've left a rude comment on his social media, she hates you if you acted like she didn't like him or that she was shading him, she hates you if you bullied the people around him, she hates you if you said something disparaging about how he looks or how he acts, she. hates. you.

And sure, it's not all people who are in her or Pen's fanbase, in fact a lot of people have been cruel about him outside of the Polin fandom, but a LOT of people are Pen fans, and hearing her talking about how defensive she gets over him when people say something rude about him? And knowing there are SO many stupid opinion blogs and youtubers and tiktokers who say they're Pen fans and Nicola fans but are mean as fuck about Luke?

I need every single one of them, in particular those who have been out here making up stupid shit to be mad at him about 'on her behalf' to know that when you say something mean about the man she gushed to her Mum about, and who her Mum was so excited to meet because she just knew he was kind, the man she introduced to her entire family, the man she is always reaching for and hugging and snuggling up to and calling wonderful and giggling around and saying how she wouldn't want to do such vulnerable intimate scenes without and complimenting and leaning on and having fun with and calling a special person in her life, she is taking off her earrings and ready to meet you outside in his honor

because she hates you for being a dick about him. hope that clears things up

[idliketobeatree]

good omens as a tragedy (crowley got his slutty little waist grabbed only once when he was too high off laudanum to properly notice and next off he went to superhell)

[moldy-flowers]

Me n @bubba-buff drew Sakura a (Not belated I Have NO idea what you're talking about) birthday gift of her from childhood shows we watched

here's Bubbas GORGEOUS art (THAT THEY DREW AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT BTW??? The skill on them like what 😭) with my colouring and shading!! This is her from winx club,,, I like the sparkles they were fun to add. I mean I literally used a brush to do it but it was still fun lol. I SPEDRAN THE AXE SHADING BC I DIDNT KNOW WAYY INWAS DOING IDK HOW TO SHADE METAL WAA 😭😭😭

Heres my art with Bubbas gorgeous colouring 💞💝��️💗♥️❣️💓💞💝💗❣️💖💝💌💌

My dad made fun of her hands 😞😞 BTW SHES FROM CARD CAPTOR SAKURA!!!!! I couldn't pick between literally making her card captor Sakura or making her a clow card so i kinda mixed both??? It doesn't look like a clow card or like she's a Card captor but blegh! It was fun. And it was also fun when I finished the colouring before bubba could bc of the flowers lmao

[breadmecoshy]

So, we have a MC with obvious suicidal tendencies, who finds himself in terrible circumstances, a ML who is desperate and has lost everything, who is depressed for most of the book, sounds like fun reading for the evening

The main characters of the novel "How to survive as a villain", Yan Heqing, and Xiao Yuan in the body of the Emperor of the North and in their own body

I'm reading this story for the second time, and for the second time I'm crying on the best arches

[nexus-nebulae]

watching a video and someone went like "she died because she 'lost the will to live'. if she had died from an ACTUAL MENTAL ILLNESS that would be fine, but instead she just 'lost the will to live'" like 1- what do you think depression is. 2- this is why focusing on the label rather than the actual state of existence will always be ableist and harmful. not everyone is given the language for that shit

[dramas-vs-novels]

I've seen a lot of stories lately about different duos splitting, and it made me wonder... Why do you think MMY and DMD seem so good at creating duos that last?

DMD certainly had their rough phase, nearly every duo they launched with originally when they swapped to a drama house split (except for Jimmy and Tommy, their split was special circumstances).

I know MMY let one partner pick the other (Either Boss picked Noeul or Noeul picked Boss, and I think... did Fort pick Peat or other way? IDK about ChanyaAya or ForthDonut). But MMY also puts out shows so slowly that it's still not clear if duos will be long lasting or not (well, to be fair, FortPeat and BossNoeul have both said recently that they have zero intentions of splitting within the next several years).

DMD really hit lightning in a bottle with ZeeNuNew, MaxNat, and TutorYim staying together for so long. IDK what they were doing to get it so right, but they do genuinely seem to have good eggs who get along really well with one another personally and professionally.

Maybe this is related, but those two companies, their shows have this feeling like... you can tell when they had a lot of fun filming a show. Even if you never saw the behind the scenes, you can tell they care, they had a lot of passion for the story and the characters, and they just seem to genuinely enjoy each other's presence.

I'm sure that helps too.

[onebizarrekai]

I've been going back and forth trying to decide whether I want to make the old ibvs oneshots be available on ao3 but every time I look at them I go into a state of shock at how… absolutely teenager they are

also this

[justalittlebluetiefling]

Sometimes I try to write down thoughts about this campaign but I admittedly have not been paying enough attention to feel confident in my character analysis so I write an incoherent text post and then delete it because I don't know if I'm actually making the correct judgments.

[thatfriendlyanon]

on one hand i know being debilitatingly anxious is worse, but on the other hand i also hate feeling like i cannot move for .. days at a time

[lollytea]

Huntlow situationship gives me such intense brain termites you don't get it

[mokeonn]

Before I go to sleep I leave you all with this piece of advice: sometimes you don't actually have to answer big political questions, sometimes you can just say "I am not smart enough to know that, I just know the small things I do to help." Like you can often times completely avoid making a fool of yourself if you just say you don't know.