#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.

[somelazyassartist]

Look at my cat she is going to be turned into stickers that you can put in your home on your fridge on your cereal boxes on your golden retriever wherever you want. AND she's gonna have little shiny hearts on her :] just need to wait for them to finish being made and arrive here I'm so excited.....

[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

[definitionsfading]

times continue to be kinda tough out here. my mother had me held captive in the car yesterday while we were in traffic and went on a political rant in order to harangue me for about 20 minutes, 10 of which I spent crying until my eyes were bloodshot. I'm being gaslit but I don't think she knows she's doing it; like there isn't any intent to viciously manipulate me for her own gain, she's just that convinced of her delusions and beliefs. she thinks she's right and everybody else is wrong.

much of the stuff she said, I cannot repeat here because it would be too painful and terrible to read. there was a lot of "Donald Trump was the Christian choice" stuff being thrown around, on and on it went. it's so weird because I was crying with true sorrow lmfao...it wasn't hysterical sobbing or incomprehensible blabbering. I don't often cry like that and can't think of another time where I did. it was just silent tears of absolute pain. my voice was calm. it was so strange.

she finally said "I can't sit here and watch all this crying, I won't keep on" and left me in the car in the grocery store parking lot 😂 it's funny in a way because I am one thousand percent, entirely, alone in my beliefs where I currently live. I am ALONE. nobody sides with me or agrees with me. I'm surrounded on all sides by people with violent beliefs and hatred in their heart, who think the hatred they feel is justice. it's crazy. part of me is accepting it simply because I know I can't do anything else in the short term.

[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.

[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?

[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

[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

[stellardeer]

Yall ever think about how much is passed down between children that adults may be completely oblivious to.

Which goes for positive and negative things.

Like games that an older child taught to a younger one, who then taught it to another child below them the next year. There's plenty of stuff I remember doing that no adult ever taught me.

But that also goes for the bad parts of being young like bullying.

It's why it would be so hard to stop the cycle of bullying altogether. A 5th grader treats the 4th graders like they're all babies and they need to stop doing certain things and act a certain way, and the 4th graders don't like it but they internalize it so they end up doing the same thing to class below them a year later. Or high school seniors treating freshman like absolute dogshit just for being freshman, and they hate it so much but by the time they become seniors they think they've earned the right to do the same thing to the younger kids. So it repeats indefinitely.

And it's not even necessarily something that adults can intervene in if they don't know it's happening. They can give all the bullying PSAs they want and maybe they'll catch one individual act and punish it, but you would have to convince multiple generations of students to drop this behavior in order for it to truly disappear.

[homunculus-argument]

If I had more money than I'd ever spend in a lifetime, I'd spend my life operating a pizzeria at a loss. Something with the slogan of "it ain't italian but you're hungry" - and a statement of how this is not authentic italian pizza because the owner's estranged aunt's italian ex-husband would not serve pizza in his italian restaurant because as far as he was concerned, a pizza is the "just throw that shit together" dish that you make out of leftovers, and he would not serve that to paying customers even if they wanted it. True story btw.

But I'd just like to run a place where the staff is allowed to tell rude customers to fuck off. And if they're scared to do that, they can summon me downstairs to do it myself (this fantasy involves having my own apartment upstairs of the restaurant), because you don't fucking disrespect my staff like that. Develop a reputation as a place where You'd Better Act Yourself or you get nothing, which elevates the quality of the food in peoples' minds because it's human to assume that more work=more worth, and if a pizza place can afford to simply throw rude customers out, that clearly must mean that the food is just that good that going back is worth it anyway.

Hiring enough people to get the work done in a leisurely pace and occasionally have the time to chat with each other or customers. You just do the job I gave you in the time I gave you, don't steal anything and don't watch porn off your phone anywhere where the customers can see you, you're good. Don't care if you quit school at 16 if you can still mop floor. Don't care if you've been to prison because you killed some guy, as long as you're not doing that here. Don't care if you deal drugs on your free time as long as you don't bring your business to your day job. This place is exclusively for pizza business.

Have an item on the menu called "random pizza" - and if you order that one, they'll just throw in a mix of whatever ingredients we've got too much of, like if the bell peppers gotta be used before they go bad, every single random pizza is going to have them until they're either gone or need to get tossed. If you've got dietary restrictions or allergies, you gotta specify that while ordering, because other than that, random pizza is just whatever ingredients we need to get rid of. Surplus ingredients du jour.

Building a reputation as a place that's somehow simultaneously sketchy as hell but also remarkably high quality, getting five star restaurant customer service from a waiter with blue hair and stick-n-poke tattoos, there's a homeless guy at the back of the kitchen eating an order that nobody picked up, every surface is spotless and no matter how important of a suit-and-tie you are, if you won't behave yourself the owner will personally physically fight you.