#personal experience to be frank

[distortedidentity]

Technology is such a fucking trap. You get your first device at 10 latest if you're lucky, and then you're immediately shitblasted with 5 different sources of addiction all at once. Will you game, doomscroll, or develop a crippling addiction to pornography? None of that catches your interest? You can always try gambling, or snuff films!

Enjoy watching your brain chemistry permanently change, enjoy neglecting your social and academic lives to the point where both are in shambles! Say goodbye to any hobbies you have, because hooking up to the machine is a full time commitment!! Your parents hate you, and/or wonder how they failed you! ☆

What's that, tech just isn't doing it for you anymore? Have you considered substance abuse? Energy drinks? Vapes? Liquor? Hard fucking drugs? Do you feel better now? Do you feel anything now? Just the will to die? Okay! Be sure to recommend us to your friends

[stewyhosseini-bf]

Also the fucking irony. Of Kendall getting mad at Tom for that unhinged line but then calling shiv a piece of dirt like 20 minutes later is not lost on me but also that really is the quintessential sibling experience, it has to be said

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

Lights out! Poppy: Ahh I had such a refreshing na- Why is Sally glowing?

LMFAO YEAH. pretty much how it goes...

[sanctiphera]

Are we waking up to reality yet? Anne Frank had nothing to do with Gaza, so there is no reason to deface her statue unless the real reason is nothing to do with Gaza.

This is a pretty low thing to do, but I'm sure they're going to find a way to sink even lower.

[all-that-jazz-93]

Would anybody be interested in a Frank Burns redemption AU

[dykeofmisfortune]

i think it's completely accurate to call mcr a queer band like they literally ARE Doing Queerness when gerard does real gender fuckery and they kiss each other and call themselves "the fag from mcr" and write faggot on their neck and ask boys to take off their shirts during concerts and do camp affectation like that is just. queer. it's stupid and reductionist to force them into labels of being "straight guys appropriating lgbt aesthetics"

[psymachine]

which two members of the gang are running this scam selling this product next season?

[july-19th-club]

caN'T you see i am in the THROES OF PASSION???? i can and im so sorry about that . king are these detectives bothering you

[pawfulofwaffles]

Butterfly :D

[puccafangirl]

Sorry but I'd just like to take the time to talk about how hard I fangirled when a character as obscure as Sparky showed up in Kingdom Hearts. I fucking love it when they reference obscure Disney media in those games it's just fanservice at its absolute best! :D

[maaaahri]

I think the worst thing about the perception of health, both mental and physical, and being disabled in either regard, is that the need for extra support is often viewed, institutionally and therefore culturally, as a dehumanizing element rather than a simple fact of the human experience. No man is an island, and yet, when it comes to needing anything from an IEP to a caretaker, these things are used to subvert one's rights and create the expectation of failure and that's a little ableist innit.

[tadpoledancer]

there's a lot to be said about the political atmosphere of the late 2000s/entirety of the 2010s being infested with alt right gateways like pewdiepie, filthy frank, idubbbz, leafyishere, "sjw gets owned compilation" videos and all that, and there absolutely were adult nazis and other white supremacists grooming children and teens in vulnerable mindsets into thinking they had a community in the right wing, but to say or act like anyone who fell down the alt right pipeline at any point in life are the main victims in this situation is absolving them of any accountability and responsibility for traumatizing minorities

[autumnhobbit]

my brothers got into some trouble with an elderly neighbor (not necessarily undeserved) but it was a difficult experience for my youngest brother because he told me that it shakes the illusion of believing you fit into any sort of group. ‘city people don’t like you, and oh look at that, turns out country people don’t like you either.’

me: oh yeah, so i belong literally nowhere

him: yep.

[deathonist]

just some dunes being dunes in camden last night.

pics by me! credit me if you use them!

[giantkillerjack]

To give credit to the last of us for its queer rep, it’s not just queer characters who have tragic/bittersweet endings. Literally everyone (siblings, parent and child, heterosexual) queer or not, has tragic endings. The older queer couple gets the best one out of all of them.

I guess? I mean, it is certainly much better than if they were the only characters to die in the storyline. But people were on tumblr talking about how theirs was a happy queer story. And I think it is the misleading discussion around these characters that bothers me even more than the writing. Like if I had watched that episode instead of looking up the plot summary, I would have had a meltdown at the end when they both died because I truly had gotten the impression that it was going to be a happy story.

But now that I've mentioned the writing:

It's nice that they live till their 70s. It's nice that they get 20 beautiful years together. And it's a bit fucked that the writers felt the need to end those 20 long years on-screen with a terminal illness and suicide in the same episode they are introduced. It would have been incredibly easy to just say that those men get to live on past the end of the episode. There are a million reasons those men could have continued living in the story.

But that's the thing about a show like this. I think there is a distinct possibility that this show is actually incapable of writing a satisfying happy ending.

Craig Maizin, the show's writer, gained acclaim recently with Chernobyl, proving that he is apparently excellent at writing a long, horrifying tragedy in which character struggle only to find there is no way out.

(His other main credits are The Hangover sequels and the Scary Movie sequels, most of which I haven't personally seen, so make of that what you will.)

But more than the writer's background, the show itself troubles me. It has this repeated mantra in it that goes, "when you're lost in the darkness, look for the light." Which is a cool phrase.

But I have reason to suspect that this writer genuinely doesn't know how to write the light. I have no reason to believe he does. I hope I am wrong.

But when you write episode after episode after episode that is an endless inescapable slog of tragedy and desperation - and then advertise it to me, a sick queer person actually living through a pandemic and trying to escape disease and poverty - well.

I think a better writer would include moments of light and hope beyond just trauma bonding. Moments that don't end in death.

When my wife writes about characters in awful situations, there are still these moments of genuine loveliness and fun and joy between the characters; these moments remind the reader what is worth actually fighting for, living for. Imagine! Entire chapters in a post-apocalyptic novel in which characters don't undergo a "hacking someone to death with a cleaver" level of trauma!

But the fact that Bill and Frank still had to die even after an earnest attempt to tell a beautiful love story....

I fear that the light the story ends with - if there is any - will be as dim and desaturated as the show itself. And personally, I am at a point in my life where I don't care to see a story like that.

It's fine if you do like it. It doesn't matter to me if you find beauty in a tragic queer love story. There are places for that in this world. But it is tragic. I am sure of that. And I wish I hadn't been seeing posts saying otherwise, ya know?

And I hope I am wrong about the writer. But I see cracks in the premise. Like in Stranger Things. There was always a promise of light that kept me watching, but it never seemed to come. Instead, the misery and trauma continued to stack and compound for the lead characters, like in TLOU. But... does the writer know how to make that worth it, for us, for the audience - for me? I don't think he does.

I think it very possible that the light isn't really coming for Ellie and Joel in a way that provides catharsis because I have noticed that on shows with no intermittent joy and hope, this is too often the case.

But I do hope I'm wrong. Because if I am right, then a lot of mentally ill fans will leave the experience more depressed than if they hadn't watched it at all.

But for my own part, I'll just continue to skim through the show for monster design ideas. And also I'll say that everyone should watch Infinity Train - ESPECIALLY season 2 of Infinity Train, if they'd like to see a story in which people actually DO find a light that makes the whole journey feel worth it.

[roystory4]

@thediffidence THATS THEIR MAN!!!!!!!! its true though.