#tbh I have had many people tell me they want me to

[yourgamemasterthewhiterabbit]

Tbh 'get in touch with your appreciation for solitude' is fucking right. All friends and family I even had left ran out of patience for "can we find a safe way to include me" before even trying. I go out for doctor's appointments all masked up and equally masked for groceries. I only go out for groceries because I have so many allergies and sensitivities that letting someone else pick out products for me doesn't work, and as a disabled person I can't have a credit card, so delivery services don't quite work for everything. I'm currently fighting with a prepaid card company that might be ripping me off for 507$.

I've been trying to solve the problem of "how do I re-socialize myself safely" since the pandemic started because I could already tell the end wasn't in sight, I already had pretty much no friends left, and I didn't want to wait until I was desperately lonely and already depressed and neurotic about it...

And to be honest I never really figured anything out.

I've joined discord servers before but it largely isn't for me. I just don't have the social energy to hang out with a large group of strangers with no known shared interests for the sake of spending social energy alone because I feel like I should. I end up lurking with no interest in the conversations until I just start ignoring another server.

I keep telling myself that after the next health episode clears up and after I get my apartment organized I'll get back to trying to figure out what a social life looks like for me... But since the end of 2019 when this started... It just hasn't felt like that pressing of an issue compared to everything else. Even before covid I have been having to mass cut people out of my life because already having had limited ways of meeting people had already left me surrounded with a social circle full of people who were abusive or would side against me if they were told someone else was being abusive.

As it turns out, for me, largely socializing was way more stress and obligation than it was actually worth. I already wasn't getting anything out of socializing as an adult, and now even trying runs the risk of getting infected with something that could kill me.

I keep having thoughts about how to meet people online that actually have lots to talk about, with me specifically, and I still talk to a couple online friends from the before times, but largely my biggest social outlet is just being on tumblr. I'm not engaged with anything emotionally enough right now to be engaged with another person talking about it. I lack the emotional energy to invest in anything but recovery right now. Also I find most groups repellent.

I tried those aps that claimed to be for making friends and forbid hooking up, but everyone just uses them to hook up. I tried discord servers for people over 30 just wanting to make friends, its all full of openly sexual flirtation and they boot you if you don't talk enough. Most the interest groups I tried to join feel like being in a room of chattering kids.

I'm not a 'groups' kind of person, I'm a 1 on 1 quiet gathering at most kind of person, a write letters or stay up till 3 am chatting at a coffee shop kind of person and I do not know how to translate that to meeting people online. I don't even know how to reach past hookup culture enough to convince anyone not to try talking to me just because they are looking for people they can eventually meet and hook up with.

You got to a server for people over 25 [25-40] that forbids sexual advances and you get paired up with someone who acts 14, actively flirts and then loses interest when you don't flirt back and are actually over 30 like the age range of the server states you are expected to be.

You go on whisper, an anonymous local confession app, and everyone stops talking to you once they realize you are serious about not wanting to hook up and not being interested in buying drugs. They laugh at you for pointing out it isn't a dating app, and tell you to try acebook. Then you are asexual on ace-book and get told "yeah but this is largely for asexuals who are looking for sex anyway"...

I have stalkers so there's lost of local aps I just can't use because they want a valid photo and my real legal identity. Besides that, people meeting on local aps generally have the expectation of meeting up eventually, and not like, wanting to be close so you can drop things off for each other or play mailbox tag for fun. Mostly they expect sex is the only real reason you'd want to meet people close by.

If I ever do have a dating life again, it will be strictly in text, but then I have to contend with "how do I verify this person is actually over 30"? and I just don't think I have the energy or resources to field that.

I'll join this server. I've joined others, I can outline the problem and why the current solutions aren't working for me personally, but I don't have a great suggestion for how to fix any of it yet.

At least I've always liked spending time alone, so I have that going for me. Can't imagine how anyone who isn't the most extreme introvert is coping with this.

I just want to ask covid safe nation... HOW are you dealing with the loneliness? Everyone wants to dine in and drink, or if they have a non-food indoor event, no one is masking. I haven't made new friends in years because no one will make it safe to hang out. What do y'all do???

It's mostly online for me. I have a couple friends who will do things like listen to records while I mask and run the central air with windows wide open, but most of my former friends have abandoned me too, and it hurts a lot because not even two years ago, they were praising me for taking good care of my elderly parents who I refuse to pass covid to. I think the best thing to do is get in touch with solitude. If you're looking for like-minded online community, I run a discord covid-safe folks can join and chat about anything you can think of. We do game nights sometimes (I wanna get back on that horse, but it's been a busy time in my life lol. Might be a week or two before I can commit to running that again.)

[scintillyyy]

Hi. I love every second of your blog going "Fuck Chuck Dixon. All my homies hate Chuck Dixon." concurrent with "Dixon could often be remarkably competent as a writer with legit interesting ideas." Please never stop writing metas.

listennnnnn i hate dixon he's awful. he's also written stuff i really enjoy despite the many glaring faults.

the thing with dixon that i'm always trying to suss out tho. like, i think because current day dixon has been radicalized in a truly awful and horrendous way, there's a lot of desire to place his current day radical beliefs onto every aspect of his past works and blame everything on him and him alone as this one terrible writer who ruined all characters for ever and ever just because he's a conservative. but like. i think that because he's an awful person it's easy to place blame on him retroactively for some things that weren't necessarily solely a product of his conservatism or his fault alone.

and mmm. i never ever deny the conservatism present in his works. it's present in his robin book with tim, it's present in his nightwing book with dick, and it's present in his batman books with bruce. but people sometimes act as if he was working in a batoffice that had the current day issues it does where writers are given a carte blance to do whatever they want with all characters with little regards to continuity or character growth. that did not happen during his tim under denny in the 90s--denny o'neil was known for running a fairly tight ship (i can't find the interview but there's an interesting retrospective interview he does wrt jason where he talks about his failures as an editor and how he was too hands off and not firm enough allowing writers to do what they pleased which led him to become a much stricter and firm editor following jason's death because he learned from the experience). dixon in that interview i posted made it clear that o'neil wouldn't even let dixon touch the joker until dixon had demonstrated to o'neil he had a grasp on the character that o'neil approved of. dixon would not have been allowed to do whatever he wanted with characters like robin/tim. without o'neil putting a stop to it if he had gone too far. and for the record, o'neil was a big old bleeding heart liberal that, at the time at least, dixon is noted to have gotten along with very well despite their political opinion differences even at that time. dixon says he was an avid read of grant's work on batman. he's awful now, but at one point he was probably younger and a bit more willing to entertain ideas that weren't his own too.

so when i look back on his work as a historical work, i'm always trying to tease out the following - is this representive of dixon's brand of conservative views in particular or is it representative of a different, overall more conservative time era. and there's a lot of things that fall under the second umbrella that get attributed to the first tbh. listen i love no man's land and understand that despite my love it is full of copaganda and downright conservative ideals by today's standards. but NML wasn't written solely by dixon to push a uniquely conservative pro-cop view--o'neil approved of the story and was the editor of the office at the time. rucka was a huge player in helping tell this super pro-cop story (he even wrote the novelization!!) and nobody ever really puts blame on him for these things the way they do dixon afaik. NML being written in a 'democrats trying to be tough on crime' era absolutely means it's not solely the fault of dixon and his evil conservatism, but he often gets the flack as if it were despite the fact that he was getting these stories okayed by people on different ends of the political spectrum than him + these stories were not his evil conservative brainchild alone.

so these are the things i'm thinking when i read through his works. and maybe that gives me a rosier view than it should, but a lot of my thoughts come from "what can reasonably actually be attributed to showcasing what dixon's views actually are" vs "what might actually not be his fault and his fault alone".

and when i say that tim generally isn't the one who showcases his personal views, i'm not trying to minimize the fact that there is inherent conservatism baked in to his character along with everyone else written by dixon, i'm saying that we need to be realistic and realize that dixon did not have as much freedom to do with tim what he had freedom to do with tim's side characters. tim, after all, had to ultimately fit in o'neil's batbible framework of what he was supposed to be because tim was ultimately an IP character who was part of a batman and robin mythos that o'neil was very, very protective of in the 90s given his previous failures to maintain control of the ship. so when you consider dixon's particular conservatism in tim's books you need to consider that the vast majority of it came from the characters surrounding tim (such as his dad, dana, steph, etc) because dixon had more freedom with those sorts of characters, rather than tim himself who often doesn't have any particular opionion of his own--he's just reacting to all the different opinions being presented to him. and that's not to say that those character should be evil conservatives forever and ever--in fact, i personally think they shouldn't. but take the racist and classist inner city kids are bringing guns to school storyline in robin #25-26. as a whole it's a conservative story. o'neil allowed dixon to do the story in the first place when he could have said no. in the story tim wanders around not knowing what to do about karl bringing a gun to school--which is why he has to go to his dad and dana, who represent "go to the cops/don't be a narc options"--his dad is the one who tries to talk to karl's dad--karl is the conservative one who thinks that they need to protect themselves from inner city kids compared to tim who thinks that guns shouldn't be in school. but tim also thinks that they shouldn't go to the cops and wants his dad to handle it by himself, but eventually comes to the realization that he should have gone to school administration to begin with. in these issues, steph is also the one who dixon uses to link karl's shooting to the inner city kids who are getting bused in to the suburban schools--we talk about that panel of steph declaring herself the protector of the suburbs, but also that panel in context is within the confines of the story--steph is essentially saying "maybe the suburbs need a spoiler (to protect themselves from the inner city people coming to bring crime out to them)" which absolutely is a conservative dixonism that you can pinpoint to his particular kind politics in comparison to the milquetoast of tim's "i don't know what to do/talk to a trusted adult to get help before tragedy happens PSA/overall conservativeness" that happens. that the story itself that exists in tim's book is conservative, yes, and i won't deny that tim also has a few conservative dialogue here but to me the difference is that o'neil would not let dixon use tim drake to go on any overtly political rants or represent any specific ideology *himself* that could make him controversial with readers of the time given how protective o'neil was of not repeating his previous mistakes. you're generally going to find the more egregious dixonisms outside of tim. like "robin 1993 is a conservative book that has a pro-life storyline" (true) =/= "tim goes on an anti-abortion rant" (not true, literally never happened). tim shares blame because ultimately it is his book that presents a conservative worldview but tim as a character tends to exist as a more moderate (not completely, but more) character to have other characters present options and opinions to him rather than he himself saying he has those opinions. robin cannot take sides like that. o'neil wouldn't have let that happen.

and like. when discussing dixon my goal is never to completely absolve tim of dixon's writing. i just don't often see a need to completely rehash the tim-conservatism points because it's been discussed already over and over again to the point there's a pretty widespread misconception that tim is the ultimate dixon conservative mouthpiece who is solely at fault for all of robin 93's conservatism when actually there's a lot of other interesting places dixon's conservatism presents that are almost never discussed in comparison. my goal is not to be "tim's not at fault" or anything but it is to seriously consider and think about where i see dixon's personal opinions shining through more overtly based on what i know of the conservative mindset (as much as i don't agree with it). dissecting dixon and how he writes in consideration of his beliefs is fascinating and fun to me.

anyways he's awful.

[20001541]

I wish the anime hadn't cut this part out. It really highlights how afo presented himself as a savior to those who felt lost during the dawn of quirks which was how he was able to get such a huge following.

we see him do that during present day too as we see how he exploits those, particularly children, who society forgot about by taking them in and caring for them so they'll remain grateful and loyal to him.

[rosicheeks]

🙃

[chocolate-cream-soldier]

//rant.

[bunnyboy-juice]

;~; (tags vent)

[wildevenusian]

i just don’t understand. why say ur ready to talk if you aren’t?

can u believe this post is what got me to reach tag limit

[girlivealwaysbean]

it would feel so nice to work towards a career that has meaningful impact and makes millions of people happy

[discoreptile]

Beasties of Greenhollow soundtrack! Some tracks on this are from older projects like elphame but all of them have been reworked in some way. Most of them are entirely new. Enjoy!

[giantkillerjack]

Dear horror youtubers who write video essays explaining and examining extraordinary works of horror that I deeply want to see and understand but will literally never be able to safely watch due to my own trauma - thus providing me with a way to learn from and connect to works of art that would be otherwise forever inaccessible to me,

I love you.

[pebblezone]

this Tylenol ain’t shit w

[robinsnest2111]

just listened to penny lane for the first time in years and for a moment I was a young teen again, chest deep in my beatles phase, I know it's hella cringe but the beatles were my happy place at the time, my comfort in a shitty inescapable environment

[rinhaler]

If you’re a blank blog you’re getting blocked

If you don’t have an age indicator you’re getting blocked

If you say ‘part two?’ You’re getting BLOCKT

[mangled-by-disuse]

also like if I may weigh in as someone who did their third-year anatomy project on a fat cadaver

uh

it's fine?

like i'm not saying i loved the amount of adipose (i.e. fat) tissue I had to remove to access the chest cavity (especially since it took up a LOT of embalming fluid so it was quite liquid a lot of the time), and it definitely required more work to access than a thinner cadaver might have. But ultimately, the hardest part of that project wasn't "oh no the cadaver is fat", it was "oh no I've never had to remove ribs before and I somehow wasn't prepared for this to involve pliers".

also, honestly, the parts of that cadaver with the most fat (breasts and jaw - I was dissecting for the laryngeal nerve, which is in the neck, so I didn't go below the first two ribs) were actually the easiest parts to remove the adipose tissue from, because you could do it in lumps. The hard parts to deal with are the thinner or visceral fat patches, because those are more delicate work - but you also don't know those are there until you get to them, because they're not visible from the outside and are just as likely to be significant in a skinny person as a fat one. (also they tend to be around the delicate structures you're looking for, whereas the fat which is most affected by being fat is the large areas immediately under the skin, like the belly and breasts and butt, which is on top of the core structures so it's easier to remove without needing to be super delicate.)

meanwhile the other person who had the laryngeal nerve project was working with a cadaver which had almost no body fat at all and she did NOT seem to be finding it significantly easier.

Time-wise, I actually finished my project second out of a class of 12, by the way, and did extra work on it (the chest investigation wasn't in the original plan, I just hit a point where I'd fully dissected and recorded the neck and throat and I still had four lab sessions left). Almost like the weight of a cadaver doesn't correlate directly to how long it takes to dissect. go figure.

The reason fat cadavers are not accepted for medical programmes is that you need to cut through every layer of fat carefully. Which takes time, and lab sessions are inherentely limited in that. It's better for med students to spend that time looking at what organs actually look like in bodies. This isn't fatphobia, it's just .. the way dissecting bodies works? In the same way surgeries on fat people take longer because there's just physically more tissue. The alternative would be to force the med students who get fatter cadavers to do more lab sessions at weird times outside of the usual schedules. Or force them to stay over the holidays. Or not let them get enough time to do the lab work they need to. Which imo would be a bit fucked up especially when med school is already so difficult and time-consuming.

It’s fatphobia. Fat bodies absolutely need to be studied. To ignore an entire demographic of oppressed individuals in the medical field for the sake of convenience(?!) is violence. Did you even read the article? They called working on fat cadavers “unpleasant.” It’s fatphobia and it’s unacceptable.

[tossawary]

One of my personal nitpicks for historical fantasy is a lack of servants, staff, subordinates, and... idk... subjects? Like, their absence is not... a total dealbreaker for me, depending on the situations the characters are in and whether or not I can just assume that other people are there in the background... but so many of the protagonists in historical fantasy stuff are higher-ranking (very often royalty), and/or have busy jobs, and/or have enormous houses that would necessitate having at least part-time staff.

Like, girl, you should have a maid! WHERE is your chaperone?! WHO is driving this carriage?! Where are your footmen? Are you trying to imply that a WEALTHY DUCHESS is taking a CAB?! You know that you probably have tenants, right? Where is your steward?! Where is your lawyer? Your accountant?! (Like, yeah, you're not going to have your lawyer living in your house, but you HAVE one, right???)

Or, man, you're supposed to be a military commander and you don't even have a single secretary?! Where is your SQUIRE?! (In the spirit of historical fiction, I am jumping wildly across time periods with every sentence here.) Man, I know you aren't looking after your own boots. Where are your GUARDS?! Who set up this tent for you?! Who is looking after your horse?! Who is making and carrying the incredibly valuable maps people are recklessly stabbing daggers into?!

SOMEONE has to be scrubbing these floors and delivering the mail and cooking the meals and doing laundry, and they're probably all DIFFERENT people! My dentist has at least three different receptionists and we can't even get ONE for our court wizard here? A sorcerer's apprentice to take notes? Someone like Sherlock Holmes could get away with just having a housekeeper and taking taxis, sure, but your character is supposed to be a KING?! Why is he answering his own front door? He's going to get assassinated. His SERVANTS should have SERVANTS.

Like, yes, I understand that a lot of servants in certain places at certain times were supposed to make their labor invisible, but there have always been servants who still had to interact directly with the masters of the house?! Yeah, there are potentially really messy ethics here, class divisions are bullshit, but I don't think that completely ignoring the reality that humans have ALWAYS been doing work for other humans is better than just including some well-paid and well-treated servants and employees? Because a complete absence of them, especially where logically for the worldbuilding there MUST be servants (and probably exploited servants, or worse, for some particular worldbuilds to work), often makes me think that your main characters just don't care enough to notice the "lower class" people or know their names.

Also, even Frodo Baggins had a gardener and Samwise Gamgee might be the best damn character in the story?! Sam saved the world?! Servants are PEOPLE. Servants are often the funniest and most interesting characters, tbh, with the most to say about a society and its workings (yes, Discworld is a very good book series, highly recommend), and also the joke of some romantic scene being carefully orchestrated by a stage crew of servants frantically diving into bushes to stay out of sight never gets old to me. Teamwork makes the dream work!

I don't want to gatekeep historical fiction, especially not historical fantasy, because the worlds don't necessarily have to conform to our own and may have magic and characters are often in very unique circumstances, but... sometimes I pick up a story and it's like... "Author, please tell me that you know there is a difference between a butler and a valet?!"