#my mum had to help me

[mangostar]

just woke up from a 2 hour nap that i took as soon as i got home and when i sat up and looked down blood just spew out onto my shirt

[gingerbreadpopsolo]

I FED UP WITH THE ARGUMENT

[obsob]

here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud!!

✷(print shop)✷

[moeblob]

Impulsively shoving a guy's hand in your mouth after having the thought "oh just like when my little sister used to prick herself on a rose thorn" and then immediately being treated like a pet who ate something they shouldn't have? Wonderful. Thank you, Thane.

(also not pictured is Thane apparently trying to scrape your tongue with his hand BEFORE pouring the holy water down your throat because NO. BAD.)

[ofmermaidstories]

the australian government is trying to legislate kids under sixteen off of social media. so, if you are aussie and under sixteen, you won’t be allowed to have a sm account on sites like twitter, tiktok, facebook, youtube—and more.

i know our relationship with minors, as fic writers who write for other adults, is rocky at best. the rise in self-censoring and shame-based attitudes among readers in general is helping to kill any and all artistic curiosity in the next generation, which in turn makes it actively hard to be in shared, online fan spaces. it’s easy to blame the kids, but at its heart i think this is an active adult failure. our younger generations have gotten the raw end of the deal, in many ways; one of them being allowed to grow up alongside of material that they should’ve never had free access to, not without guided parenting.

And that’s the thing. the answer isn’t banning them. the legislation involved means that social media companies will be the ones to face the penalties (the fines) if minors break the new laws. which means—what? censorship gets even worse, in an effort to be even more kid friendly? Government-interest friendly? this talk started happening in the thick of the pro-palestine marches, as the movement was trickling into universities and highschools. And okay, let’s say it’s not that—what else could this be about? could it maybe have something to do with the fact that the australian government wants to implement a Digital ID nation wide?

"This one is for the mums and dads,” Albo, Anthony Albanese, our prime minister and prime dickhead, says in the announcement. “They, like me, are worried sick about the safety of our kids online. I want Australian families to know that the government has your back.”

But this isn’t about protecting kids. At the very best, they’re selling it as a scapegoat—like, oh! Haha, now you can just tell the kids it’s illegal!! It completely ignores the reality that people have to parent these humans. Like, it’s giving people, at best, an excuse to continue being lazy. They don’t have to sit down with their kids and the things they’re engaging with, anymore—because they’re banned from it! Instead having conversations about the media they encounter, it’s okay! You don’t need to worry about that anymore! The australian government wants to pretend this is about protecting kids from predators or online bullying, instead of parents confronting the fact they’ve created little assholes with unfettered access to tools to harass people with, or let their kids walk into traps because they haven’t taught them basic internet safety.

I have mixed feelings. Like any other (reasonable) adult, I worry about what kind of effects this much freedom to this much knowledge and drivel and personality can do to someone younger, someone who hasn’t like—had to learn how to make their way through a world where people are messy and a little weird and sometimes outright unlikable, but you have to still be professional about it, you know? I worry about things like micro-trends running the fun and excitement of digging in and finding some niche fashion that becomes your personality. I worry about status symbols like the right makeup and fitness pants and waterbottles getting popular too fast, and then cycling out just as quickly and creating a pace that kids without means can’t participate in as fast. I worry about podcasts run by sigma-pus males or whatever, tradwives selling glamour under the pretense of housework, like, so much of it. But these are all things that you as a parent have to negate!!! Like. You can’t just ban kids from the internet and then expect them to be normal about things whenever they’re allowed back—you have to teach them to be, to handle it. You have to teach them!!

I am saying this as an adult. An adult who likes adult things, and likes them in an open, easily-accessible space. An adult who would actively benefit from minor-free social media. There are things as an adult creator that I wanna talk about, or write about, in ways that aren’t always age-appropriate (or at all!!) for a younger audience. And look—my personal view has always been that as a fanfic writer, my responsibility to you guys (adults and sneaky-little-minors alike!!) has always been to warn appropriately on or in the fics themselves. That’s it. You get the warning labels on the tin, and you decide what to do with that afterwards. It’s not always perfect because I’m not perfect. I will make mistakes. I might not tag for something specific that ends up being a trigger for you. But the thing with fanfiction and fanfic communities is that we generally have to trust each other. I might miss a warning, but you have to trust that that mistake wasn’t a deliberate effort to hurt you. I have to trust that you guys know your own boundaries and will engage—or not!!—accordingly. I opt to treat my space here, my blog, as an open-one. Because it is! It’s a public blog LOL. If you have a tumblr account, then you have access to it! So, I try to treat this space like a public conversation in a café, or a foodcourt. Maybe I slip a raunchy little book over the table to you, and we make one or two rude jokes, or otherwise a stray rando catches the tail-end of a more serious conversation—but it’s all things I would be comfortable (enough) discussing with someone in a space where maybe I don’t know everyone involved, you know? I benefit from the knowledge that oh well, at least I don’t have to worry about local kids getting on here. 💀 But—I hate that for them!! Do I trust younger readers? Not always!!! I worry that they’ll get caught in the wrong feedback loop, that they don’t like, investigate claims or challenge information for themselves, that they’ve never had to! And hey, to be completely fair, I don’t always trust proper adult readers with that either LMFAOOO, but the point is that kids get more grace and more worry from me because they are still actively learning to be apart of things, of communities. And I think banning them from that is ultimately a mistake. To protect someone you have to teach them what to look out for, how to engage safely, how to trust themselves. And that’s not what’s going to be achieved here. This social media ban is a useless bandaid in the face of bigger problems (housing crisis, inflation, the AUKUS submarine thing i don’t even want to talk about it its stupid) that the government is waving around to distract everyone with. And it’s working. Because people would rather sit there and scroll on facebook, or whatever, instagram, instead of actively parenting.

[trans-ralsei]

okay i can't find that post any more

but i worry about the trans girls who have gaping holes where their personalities should be.

it takes a lot of effort for a person to sustain your continued spiritual and psychological existence. i've met these trans girls, and i've tried to help (or I think I've tried to help). but the deadliest part of this is that to build yourself up brick by brick requires you to fight against the currents that want you dead, that want you to be the empty husk of a human being.

that's why the whole please stay alive thing is such a resonating statement; you need to stay alive for your own sake.

in the home city that means trying to find your own shelter when rent can easily cost you a third of your wage and landlords fucking suck. that means looking for a job that won't fucking deadname or misgender you, that you can tolerate. that means surviving. that means leaving clingy and transphobic family behind and uprooting what the home city believes should be your entire support system. that means trying to live, to get to the point where you can get hormone therapy, hair removal, bottom surgery.

i can't promise that things will get better. but if you know someone like that. if you know a trans girl like that. please. keep them alive. and help them fight. help them be themselves, and grow and bloom again.

we don't have much in the home city, but there are resources. places. things that we are doing and building so that we don't lose people. allies that are fighting alongside us.

because we will win. and when we win, i hope we don't have to mourn.

[dont-offend-the-bees]

Anyone else just not feeling like a real person much lately?

[hella1975]

so there's a reason my new job got back to me so quickly about my application and that's bc it's an absolute fucking shambles like actually perfect timing for me to decide to rewatch the bear bc i have never more felt like ive been thrown into a broke on-its-knees establishment trying to crawl its way up the ladder where i am somehow a godsend to them. my old job was crazy and shambolic in the sense that the industry is just Like That but this one?????? insanity. every 5 mins i am questioning what im doing with my life. ive already had a walk-in fridge moment

[clarabowmp3]

.

[divinekangaroo]

Was thinking while watching that scene where Pol tells Ada about her abortion.

Polly really doesn't take on the mum role in the family to my mind, or even the matriarch/aunt tbh. And I think, there was some summary somewhere that referred to her as the consigliere and while she does perform a certain bouncing-board, plan formation role with Tommy (and only with Tommy, and only with insight into certain parts of his plans; I'm struggling to think of times the others listen to her without Tommy backing her up, S3 as example of when they don't), her other behaviours in the family also mean this isn't her role at all.

She's the wild older sister who is loving and explosive and hurtful, and incredibly, incredibly fragile, afraid and she feels so very scared, vulnerable and alone, most of the time. She just wants all her loved ones to be happy and safe and in achieving that, Tommy is frequently as much of an obstacle as he is the vehicle to get her that. I do headcanon that Polly lives 99% of her life in fear and on that edge of breakdown, it's just that she's lived with it so long she probably doesn't even acknowledge it any more. Her reactivity is so high.

So yeah, it's no wonder Tommy sort of plays that joint patriarch-matriarch role (arranging marriages etc), because Polly is *not* playing the matriarch.

[lyriumrain]

Shout out to everyone who was alone when they came out of surgery

I was going to make this trans-specific, but as I was typing I realised this would suck no matter what you had done. So, to people who wanted someone to be there:

I'm sorry you were alone, or if no one could visit until days later when the scary moments had already passed. I'm sorry no one was there to celebrate you coming out the other side.

You made it, you're alive. I'm hugging you and leaving balloons and stuffed animals (that you may or may not want lol) by your bedside.

[vaguely-concerned]

nothing makes me feel like a golden god quite like a new recipe turning out delicious on the first try. unfortunately, conversely nothing makes me feel more 'I am god's mistake' than spending all that time and effort on something and having to make a sandwhich b/c the results were inedible if you want to retain your capacity for delight. the duality of home chef

[tangledstarlight]

its been like 4 years i promise i am soooo normal about julie and the phantoms now

[akajustmerry]

hello followers. today, for content, i offer u a moodboard portraying many of my emotions when ppl tell me i look like my mother :)

[pynkhues]

It is interesting with Antoinette. I could see it being that Lestat genuinely had affection for her, even if he would certainly have killed her had Louis personally asked him to -- or it could be that she was just familiar, and he wanted the closest thing to intimacy he could get, so someone who knew him was better than someone who didn't. And the whole possibility that she reminded him of Gabrielle in some ways...

(x)

Yeah, I totally agree, anon.

I actually unfortunately suspect that Antoinette isn't a character the show will really come back to, and I think I'm one of three people that cares about that, haha, but where I tend to land on her relationship with Lestat is the fact that neither Lestat nor Louis actually have any friends.

That's not to say that I think Lestat and Antoinette were just friends, I don't, they obviously fucked a lot (which like, also comes down to the fact that Lestat doesn't know how to have friends he doesn't fuck, haha), but I do think the reality is that Lestat and Louis have very different racial and cultural contexts, hobbies and areas of interest which aren't things they can easily share with each other, especially not in early-1900s America, and I think that's a bigger factor in their relationship breakdown than either will admit to.

It's why Louis' able to reconnect with Jonah so quickly - they might be leading different lives, but they have more overlapping factors than they don't, whereas he and Lestat have less than they do - and for Lestat as a white theatre kid, he needs to be around other performers. I think with Antoinette, she's obviously a talented vocalist and an ambitious artist, and I can see that genuinely just being company that Lestat wants to be close with. They probably talk shit about crap theatre they've seen and do vocal runs together and fuck, and honestly for a part of Lestat, that would lowkey be a dream relationship, haha. Do I think they have a deep emotional connection? No, but given even Louis' willing to admit she's talented, and his own complex relationship with not succeeding as an artist, I wonder how much that factors in to his portrayal of her and his insecurities around their relationship (to say nothing of the fact that she's both white and a woman).

This feels like it's going on a hundred tangents, haha, but my point is maybe they'd step out on each other less or descend into unforessen levels of chaos and destruction if they both had a few friends they could talk about their identities and niche interests with!!

[hanaasbananas]

on arranged marriages

it's funny. mums been in the whatsapp rishta groups for years looking for someone i might marry. she'll send me a profile once in a while and ask what i think, if she should contact his parents or not and most of the time i say yeah, alright. nothing ever comes of it though, so when my dad calls me after work and says mum spoke to him about a rishta she's thinking of moving forward with i'm intrigued, but not particularly invested.

mum's really picky, i tell him. this probably won't go anywhere but we may as well see it through, right? dad is hesitant, but agrees when i say that i do want an arranged marriage.

but then things do move forward and the next thing i know, he is going to visit us with his parents. on the day, my uncle picks me up from work so i don't have to walk. you don't have to make a decision today, he tells me. this is just a first visit. my cousin helps me get ready and i am reminded of the similar scene in the movie vivah. nothing has to happen today, she tells me you guys are just meeting today. the thought does nothing to settle the nerves roiling in my stomach and i try to go back to my room three times instead of going downstairs until my cousin practically shoves me down them.

i enjoy meeting his mum, even though she immediately clocks my nervous clasping and unclasping of my bracelet. she hugs me as if i'm her own daughter and is so happy to see me that my heart lightens. eventually, we go to the other sitting room where the men are sitting-where he is. my nerves flare up again but he doesn't look up from his hands clasped in his lap when we walk in.

too nervous to speak, i only answer say anything when a question is directed at me and try to sneak quick glances at him across the room instead. his mum catches me more than once and smiles knowingly at me. we meet each others eyes only once for a split second and it makes my heart pound rapidly in my chest. when he speaks, i force myself to look at anyone other than him. he has a nice voice, my brain whispers and i bite my tongue, hard.

they leave, and we say they'll know our decision after a couple months. i know what my answer will be though. later, when they get back home and his mum calls my mum, i stand outside the door to eavesdrop, my heart in my throat but i can't stop my grin when i hear his mum say he's happy to go ahead with this, because there was a part of me that still worried he'd see me in person and go NOPE. she suggests that we get to know each other over the next few months and i silently beg my mum to agree. i know that where she is from, in her tradition, the bride and groom speak once or twice before the wedding if they're lucky, and that things are still done that way back home, but just as im gearing up to argue against that, she agrees. it's a miracle!

of course, chronically shy person that i am, the thought of our first conversation taking place on our mums phones is terrifying so instead i ask to get his number so we can text first. she sends his number but theres no way i'm texting first so i send them my number and thankfully he gets the hint and texts me first. i hope you don't mind me texting, i'm just shy still. i say. that's fine, he reassures me. we have time.

time, as it turns out. flies. it doesn't take long to move from texts to voice notes, to phone calls. he really does have a nice voice, i find out, and its not as awkward as i thought it would be. i didn't actually think that we'd talk that much, maybe once a week at most and yet...

i almost cried last night because we were talking about going to Pakistan together next summer and I remembered how when I was a teenager I used to daydream about going to Pakistan with my spouse and visiting all my family with him.

then over the years I sort of gave up on that idea because I'm not the type to go out and meet someone and in the desi arranged marriage market whose gonna choose me?

and now I'm 26, and we talk multiple times a day and when I catch myself thinking oh he isn't really interested, he's just talking to me because he has to to get to know me, why would anyone actually like me?? I find myself countering with well actually if that was the case why would he start calling you every day? how come you went from one call a day ending with 'i'll talk to you tomorrow' to him calling you on his way home from work and 'i'll call you after dinner' when he gets home to a THIRD call after maghrib right before bed? those are not the actions of a man who is uninterested!!

hanaas insecurities- 0, hanaas logic- 1

anyway idk where this is going except i never thought i'd be this excited and happy when it came time for me to get married but here i am and it is SO SCARY to realise that i am maybe possibly (definitely) falling for him but wow, and like? (literally the other day i was telling him a story from when i was a kid and the story had such a silly ending but it was unexpected and he laughed really hard in surprise and it made my heart almost explode i swear its so fun to make him laugh)

but like there's SO MANY logistics i'm restarting my driving lessons so i can pass before i move and i literally just got my new job in april but i'm gonna have to give my notice lmao and i've already started looking for new jobs but GAH so much stuff is happening and yet at the same time i feel so calm about it all it's wild i'm just vibing trying to enjoy my summer holidays and having the highlights of my day being when he calls lmaooo