#nobody was making me i simply Had To

[acaciapines]

If you have the time, please tell us what your favourite part is about working on watching & dreaming <3

the fact that it means im almost free <3

okay in seriousness tho. it is like, REALLY amazing to see as i finish chapters im like, i can count on one hand how much more of this series i have to write. currently i've got 1.5 chapters left of watching and dreaming and the amount of satisfaction i get every time that number ticks down? unparalleled.

but it is REALLY amazing to be like. writing all these ending scenes i've had outlined out for a while now. im on the second to last chapter!! ive like...known how this is gonna go for a while now! and im DOING IT???

wild. cannot wait til the epilogue fic bc i FINALLY figured out how it's gonna go (i decided that every character who ever got a pov gets 1.5-2k words to see what theyre up to after it all, ending w/ of course luzmari <3) and thats gonna be SO cool. literally i already know how long it will be. i just gotta Get There.

but yeah writing now is like. the finish line is RIGHT THERE. i can SEE IT.

(and of course i trip right at the end bc i have to edit + backwriting like, 2-3 fics but shhhh shhh shhhhhhh we dont talk about that <3)

[vynnyal]

Turns out Sunlit Trail isn't quite done just yet, so after all that they just send you to a dead end 😂

[torahtot]

you can always tell when someone doesn't have maga men in their life and god it makes me angry.. "if you're nice and compassionate you can be the one woman that makes them realize women aren't mean!" my mom bent over backwards for my dad for 25 fucking years he has plenty of other women kissing his ass and it never changed anything. do you really think that before being radicalized they never knew a single kind woman? they were never friends with a nice girl? alt-right men's problem with women isn't just that they've experienced too many mean women and they need to be shown that women can be nice, it's that they think women are inferior and don't deserve rights and don't understand anything so you can do what you want with them. and it takes a lot more than being nice to show someone that you aren't inferior. this isn't a case of being nice even when it's hard for the sake of deradicalization, it's about spending every fucking interaction with someone trying to get them to see you as a human being with value and a functioning intellect while they just laugh and show you that's never going to happen.

i cannot stress this enough: random women are not just going out and Being Mean to men. ur average guy interacts with plenty of women throughout his life- close women amongst their friends and family, casual interactions etc. most people don't start out being shunned by women, they start out being treated as NORMAL. & when they show their disrespect in normal society, it isn't tolerated, but when they go to alt-right spaces (which they're pushed towards online) they're told they're allowed to be as horrible as they want with no consequences because they're entitled to everything. it isn't "women aren't welcoming and the alt-right is so friendly so i'll become alt-right," it's "women don't let me disrespect them and the alt-right tells me fuck them, do whatever you want, you're entitled to it all" and why would you choose the group where you have to be a normal accountable person when there's a group that will reward you for being a shithead who gives no fucks?

the alt-right can afford to be more friendly and welcoming because they can allow bigotry. this can't work the same way for progressive spaces because we can be as kind & welcoming as possible but at the end of the day we have lines where we have to say "this behavior/speech isn't allowed in this space," and for certain people, that just can't win against a space where you can be as nasty as you want. these posts always end with a disclaimer saying "of course being kind doesnt mean you need to tolerate their bigotries" but what they don't realize and what drives me crazy is that women not tolerating bigotry IS the "women are mean" that radicalized them in the first place. they perceive you pushing back on any bigotry or bullshit as you being a meanie and treating them like they're ontologically evil. the 'kindness' they need to be deradicalized is you letting them walk all over you.

idk what the answer is to deradicalizing them and im sure relationships are part of it but you can be as kind as you want and all it will do is destroy you ime. i cant stand to see people (who have never even successfully deradicalized any man by being nice btw they always speak in hypotheticals and not from experience) double down on telling women to do things that will see no results and only hurt them, especially when any woman who has tried can tell you exactly how it went

[eddis-not-eeddis]

I keep seeing this thing where guys swear up and down that they want a good Christian girl, but then balk if that means she wants to be anything more than a wife and mother. Like, my guy, you do realize that there's a lot more to Christian women than being married or having babies? Yeah? What about a woman who works among the homeless, or runs a bible study, or volunteers to teach refugees a new language, or who takes part in the prison ministry, or who spends a lot of her spare time in another city street preaching? I see a lot of guys who claim they want "a girl who loves Jesus" but don't want anything to do with a woman who does more than just go to church and lives a life of active ministry outside of her home.

[mars-ipan]

the thing about the whole “voting is useless” argument is like. i’d rather do a useless thing than not do a useful thing

[moruboru]

having the time of my life rn

[whatisthisnonsense]

"mutants are poc analogy" "mutants are queer analogy" Listen, X-Men and as such mutants as a whole should really be disability representation, and I mean representation and not analougous to it they just occassionally also get to blast ice while having furniture not built for them, struggles with keeping their mind in the present, and constantly having people casually discuss sterilizing or euthanizing them and being considered either dangerous or simply incapable of understanding when they get mad about this. But nobody is ready for this conversation.

[siveine]

i think im so nervous about finishing my contract because i wont know what to do with myself afterwards. like, sure theyve forgotten about me and nearly abandoned me, and im quite literally being used then thrown away, but after i get my discharge papers im going to be without purpose again and i dont know if i can do it a second time

[thorntopieces]

man

[adamsvanrhijn]

another day another thought about how literally all they needed to do to make the maud plotline make sense. before even making it Better. is to simply have her not go to anybody's house other than aurora's

[throwawayasoiafaccount]

is it wrong that i live for genetic based magic

maybe???? but i can’t care 🙅‍♀️🙅‍♀️🙅‍♀️

i can’tttttt care cause it’s so devious

like… what does it mean for our magical POV characters who are so new to this shit? what does it mean for future societal development? and what did it mean for past societal development?

[silverislander]

people smarter than me have said this before but jesus christ why does every job seem to require at least a year of experience and a degree in some hyperspecific field. where did the entry level positions go? how am i even supposed to get experience if none of yall will give me a job without it?

[girlspecimen]

we so truly and honestly need to bring back free the nipple LOL like i have larger breasts and because of that larger nipples that are occasionally visible in silhouette and i’m constantly shamed and micromanaged by relatives, coworkers, even STRANGERS for having the mere shape of my body be visible even when im wearing sleepwear or dark clothing. i feel like the narrative around women’s bodies is so deeply constrictive and rooted in shame and control that we need to just get rid of it entirely and allow fully bare breasts to not be seen as obscene

[rollercoasterwords]

Have no clue if you’re still on The Prank discourse but one thing I find so interesting about it is how much it emotionally affects people compared to something like Regulus being a canonical blood supremacist or Barty torturing people or other more traditional bad guys. And I think a lot has to do with how it affects two characters that people often project themselves into (Remus and Snape) rather than just being a generic “oh ya he tried to murder someone we hear about for a line or two.” Like people don’t approach it from a literary or a character standpoint, they often seem to see it as something that wronged THEM. It’s so fascinating to me- the epitome of how one attempted murder is a tragedy but the attempted murder of many that I don’t happen to care about is an easily ignored statistic.

of COURSE i am happy to continue talking about The Prank u bring up a really interesting point!! i do think a lot of the things that become these big like...moral debates in this fandom have less to do with like. actual morality and more to do with like....constructing identity through social media. like god ok let me see if i can be concise abt this:

we're being increasingly conditioned to construct our identities around online presence and social signifiers like the media we consume; so for a lot of people the books they read or the shows they watch etc etc are not just something to enjoy but are a pillar around which they are constructing their perceptions of themself. and in order to reify that construction you basically have to put yourself in this constant feedback loop of posting these social signifiers so that other people can look at them and go "oh so this is your identity," because a performance can't be real without an audience.

SO. i feel like that's where we're getting people who will say "oh yeah i'm a [character] kin" and feel as though that is truly an important expression of their deepest personal selves. and then, once your identity is tied to those characters, any attack on those characters feels like an attack on you. you can't accept the fact that other people might interpret the characters differently, because to do so would mean to accept that this thing you've tied your identity to is somewhat meaningless/empty/fluid/unstable, which would force you to confront the fact that this identity you're performing is, in fact, a performance, and not a revealing of some true and inherent inner self.

in reality, all of the things that happen in harry potter do not hold any real-life moral weight. like...these actions aren't happening. we aren't talking about real people doing real things to each other, we're talking about characters. so to use an example from ur message, barty killing his dad is no better or worse than The Prank, because neither of those things actually happened. and THAT means that everybody can take those fictional actions and interpret them in different ways and say they think one is better or worse within this fictional context, but there is no single true and correct interpretation, because none of this is real.

so, yeah. i think ur 100% right that when we do get these really contentious debates about the morality of certain characters, it's because people aren't approaching the topic through the lens of literary critique but rather through the lens of this Personal Moral Performance. like, if you kin sirius, and someone says sirius was bad for doing The Prank, then you HAVE to defend sirius and insist that that person is wrong, because u need to perform ur own moral correctness to the audience. like, sirius can't be a morally bad character, because i kin sirius, and i am morally good.

and yeah, that definitely leads to some cognitive dissonance! people are going to be quick to defend the characters they've attached themselves to while decrying the bad actions of the characters they don't like/don't care about--again, oftentimes to perform Morality on the internet more than in service of any actual literary critique. and like. if ur stuck in this mindset of feeling like you need to be constantly proving to the world how morally good you are, then anyone pointing out the fact that you defend one character but shit on another who did similar things is gonna feel like a personal attack, and that just makes the whole situation worse because then you feel like you need to dig your heels in and insist that your interpretations are right and their interpretations are wrong, and nobody feels like they can give ground without becoming Problematic for defending/shitting on whatever character they're fighting about.

[july-19th-club]

one thing about getting sick for me is that before covid (the first time) my colds and flus and whatnot all went in a very specific pattern: i would get a sore throat for a day or two, then violently congested for three or four days, then a runny nose/drainage for three or four days after that, and finally a cough, which was my favorite part of the cold (if a person can be said to have a favorite part of a cold) because it meant it was almost over AND that the problem was largely not in my face and neck anymore. but any illness i've had since that first covid has been all over the map - either i don't get the sore throat at all, just straight into the congestion, or the sore throat happens at a different time, or longer, or worse, or i have to spit a lot because otherwise i get so nauseous from sinus drainage that i throw up, or the congestion and the runny nose happen concurrently with not just each other but ALSO the sore throat (which is what's happening right now and i hate it) and like. because it doesn't follow the pattern i spent twenty-six years of my life getting used to, i'm always freaked out. which i would be anyway because ever since i had the first covid getting sick freaks me out. and it should freak more people out if im being honest. but this is a weird one bc like. i dont know how it did that but it disrupted MY trusty sick pattern

[splendidcyan]

With my final semester of college starting tomorrow I decided to clean out and organize and label my email, and umm maybe gathering all my job rejections into one folder was a bad idea?? Aha I've heard from people that it's good to collect them and be able to look back and see how you've improved, but as someone who still isn't in the industry I want to be in it kinda umm just made me so sad LMAO. Self flagellating on a Sunday I guess