#thank you for educating me jenny nicholson

[comradecowplant]

Wait wait wait, I thought the Sims 4 star wars pack invented Batuu as a lame generalized ~star wars vibe~ city, but it's actually the name of the fucking Disney park?????? That is even stupider!!!!!!!!!!!

[tibby]

Hi Tibby! Could you please do me a solid and explain this Armie Hammer drama in your own special way? Thanks!

the thing about armie hammer is that i never trusted him and not even in like, a moral superiority or an “i saw this coming,” but in a “that man has too many teeth and it’s suspicious” kind of way. like. he had more teeth than any human being i had ever seen in my life and i knew he had to have stolen some of them. and the more i thought about it the more i realised that the teeth were just the tip of the iceberg and this man had definitely consumed human flesh. and so i told people about my belief that armie was a cannibal, and most people kind of ignored me because the truth can be scary. also it was 2019 and the hannibal renaissance hadn’t started yet, so there was probably a good chance that people didn’t know what cannibalism was. anyway! flash forward to 2021, a few weeks into january, and armie hammer dms and texts start leaking. in them he talks about wanting to barbecue a woman’s ribs and drink her blood and of course the internet runs with this and some people are like “oh they’re fake blah blah blah” but like, come on. you seriously don’t look at armie hammer and instantly know that that man ate a deer heart bloody and raw? you guys are absolutely TERRIBLE at reading people. and then more dms started leaking and there were more weird things about wanting to gnaw on a woman’s leg or something and just a general recurring theme of cannibalism. like actual cannibalism, not the ethical cannibalism debate that happened on twitter last year. which jenny nicholson got involved in, because i guess she can excuse jokes about wanting to eat people but draws the line at jokes about two characters having sex. but that’s a whole other thing. so now we’re kind of at the point where armie hammer is definitely a cannibal and he won’t respond to the accusations which kind of like, makes him look worse. all he said is that he was pulling out of a movie for his children’s safety which is a weird thing to tell the press when you could also just tell them “no i’m not a cannibal.” like i know celebrity statements are often very controlled and blah blah blah but if i was a publicist and my client was accused of wanting to eat people, i would at least get them to say “no i do not have a desire to consume human flesh.” but i guess i’m not educated enough in the ways of pr. and i guess basically armie hammer wants to eat women, this adds weird new layers to him sucking on timmy’s feet in cmbyn, we shouldn’t trust people with so many teeth, and i’ve never been wrong about anything in my life.

and that’s what you missed on glee!

[atelophobicity]

Top 10 Things You Shouldn’t Do If You Want to Finish Your Thesis On Time

It’s my entry for September! I’ve been busy in consuming new music, films, and kvariety episodes in my effort to catch up on everything. So, I decided to post monthly to fulfill my oversharing Tumblr needs and to exercise my skills in writing in English and putting thoughts into coherent words.

TL;DR of this: things I’ve done instead of doing my thesis for the past year and a half. I’m not romanticizing my not doing thesis self for the past 21 months, but I’m also not dissuading you from doing other stuff besides thesis because god knows, you will need something.

1. Got a part-time job. This was the first new thing I’ve done that really took my time and effectively gave me no time to do thesis. And yet, this was the most rewarding thing as I learned how to get my TIN, accomplish my deliverables, answer to my superiors etc. Looking back, I wasn’t the best employee and I deserved no job offers on the same company after. But still, it was a stepping stone in the right direction. Adulting-wise, anyway.

2.  Discover the art of creating.

Journal spreads. I bought a 2019 planner and I couldn’t fill it up, so I decided to turn it into a journal-planner. The art materials I used for to design pages are from old supplies bought back when I was in high school or stickers from the fandom-related events I attended. I didn’t spend money and I was given a chance to be creative.

Sew doll clothes. In K-pop, dolls that look like your idol exists. It usually comes with one set of clothes to dress it. As a “doll mother”, I wanted to dress them with new clothes but buying clothes was expensive. So, I just sewed clothes for them. I made clothes from scrap fabrics or clothes no one wears in our household. I’ve been barely successful, but it’s one of the things that keep me happy and make me feel like I’ve succeeded in one measly part of my life.

3. Purged my online files.

From my high school files. Nostalgia has been one of my coping mechanisms. I was able to be provided by lots of it when I discovered that I didn’t lose my high school files and it was on my mom’s laptop all along. Being able to relive memories while organizing my files was the best hours of that day.

To my external hard drives. Since 2016, I have been a hoarder of online files for so long that I have two EHDs to prove it. This time though, I was able to delete content that was either repetitive or uninteresting anymore. I was able to shave off some of my data bytes and am now able to save new interesting content available online (if I ever find one).

4. Realigned my priorities and consumption of K-pop as a stan and as a person by:

Selling 3/4 of my merch. Unlearning the pride that comes with owning K-pop merch was difficult, but overtime, I have been proud of myself for not falling to the traps of capitalism—at least in K-pop. Also! I was able to buy my own concert tickets with the stuff I sold so it is a win!

Joining giveaways instead. No matter how I can avoid the urge to buy K-pop merch, I still can’t help but want to own them. This is where I discovered how joining giveaways was my next best option. It takes a lot of effort and screenshots to win these things. However, if and when you win, it really feels like winning against the odds. You get free merch too!

Actually spent hours to vote and stream. In relation to the last point, since the main requirement in giveaways I’ve joined are voting/streaming proofs, I have been one of those people who collects points on voting apps or has a playlist of music videos that should be streamed. After collecting and/or streaming, I take screenshots, put watermarks there, and tags mutuals if needed. It’s relatively hard work but there’s a feeling of pride when your idol wins the poll or an MV reaches a certain amount of views and you know you participated in making that happen.

5. Rediscover Youtube. Channels like the vlogbrothers and their associates (Crash Course, Pemberley Digital among others), Buzzfeed’s shows (The Try Guys, Ladylike, Buzzfeed Unsolved) were a delight to watch after being out of the Youtube loop for so long. The platform also offered new niches of content and I allowed myself to be sucked in it. From Simply Nailogical to Ask A Mortician to amazing pop culture video essays like Lindsay Ellis and Jenny Nicholson, Youtube has all it for you! Learning something new every day is one of my favorite things and I get to do it with this website.

6. Rediscover my love of writing. (As if I’ve written anything for my thesis but here.)

Made drabbles. There is a weekly activity on my fandom where we write < 500 word drabbles on any pairings. I have been joining when I can, and through the support of the (small) community (back then), I gained confidence to write one. I’ve written at least four now and I’ve not done yet because I’ve been on a slump lately. But I’ll get back to it soon!

Short story. The same account that brought the drabble challenge created a festival where we write a pairing and write a short story with it. I decided to join the event! Not going to lie, my entry was shit, It was the first draft, it needed a lot of revisions and more constructive criticism and yet, I am still proud of it. It was the first creative fiction I wrote since 2019 and I did it in a day. And, I believe it has potential, so I’m going to review and revise the hell out of it someday.

7. Reclaim my college days.

Reconnected with orgmates. Visiting Elbi for registration and consultation purposes are brightened up by the fact that I get to do this. My first four years of college were not kind to me. I’ve forgotten a lot of things because of trauma and deep sadness that I still have until this day, and when I remember good things, they’re few and far in between. The numbered days I was in Elbi during 2019 were also few and far in between, but they were infinitely better than my academic years from 2015 to 2017. I was able to do the things I wasn’t able to do before (mostly attending Happy Ts and eating in newly-opened food places there) and I get to do it with people I love.

Made friends. One of the drawbacks of being a slot-driven student with no care of my coursemates’ schedules: I didn’t get to establish a friend group. So I didn’t get to make friends. During this time, I’ve accepted that I didn’t have any friends outside my organizations. But this time, instead of a feeling of dread of being that cliché orgmate, I feel relief and happiness because now, I realize that I do have friends from college, unlike the 2015-2017 who didn’t have anyone in college to rely on her darkest times.

8. Appreciated my friends more. For the past few years, I was the shitty friend. I agreed to go on hangouts only to message them that I’m backing out the last minute—sometimes I even straight up ghosted them. I really took my friends for granted. I have been slowly making it up to them by always attending when there’s an invite! I sometimes initiate the invite and it’s always a fun and healing time for me (it was a literal healing time for me as I was depressed during that time). I love them and I’m always thankful for them—and more so now than before.

 9. Unlearning things like:

Realizing that a priv (a private account meant to be seen by your mutuals you trust; usually contains unpopular opinions and hot takes on stan twitter) only encourages negative emotions and I must not do it again.

No matter how I tried rationalizing my hate for Jennie when the JenKai dating news happened, I was one of those K-pop stans who hated her because she dated my idol. (I have moved on past that and have started liking her and Rose.)

Knowing that attacking people for what they say won’t make them unlearn their wrong opinions. Not talking down at them and educating with patience is the key, always.

There are still so much more I unlearned and learned where those came from. My main takeaway is: it’s complicated.  Sometimes our opinion needs a more nuanced perspective and sometimes it needs to scrapped entirely because it was just wrong. But it is essential so we, as people, won’t be stuck with outdated views of the world.

10.   Learning something new like:

Practicing how to do Tzuyu’s helicopter hands until I realized it wasn’t meant for me.

Utilizing Omegle to look for potential quaranflings.

Installing Telegram and uninstalling to ghost quaranflings.

How to do laundry in compliance with my mother’s preferences.

Doing two things at once.

Enough patience to take time and read the laws our government makes every day to know what I’m fighting against.

Optimizing my Twitter lists and now I can keep up with current affairs (that takes a toll on my mental health) then scroll through a fic fest-centric list the next (that helps me forget the stress from reading news).

Learning something new every day has become one of my life goals. Knowing that the world always has something new to offer to me, a speck in this universe, warms me up and keeps me going. And you’ll never know where the new tidbits will lead you. Maybe it’ll help you reconnect with something you’ve known before, maybe it’ll change how you see things, or maybe it’s something new that once explored, it will contribute something new to the community. It may seem small and unimportant but with a tweak in perspective, it might be something worth doing and pursuing.

Looking back at my list, I can finally see how if I didn’t do all these things, I would have probably finished my thesis by now and probably working a full-time job, able to provide the financial needs for my family. There will always be regret that I am still not done until now. But stressing over my current predicament in this time when the world is in its most stressful state yet won’t help me. So, we soldier on and hopefully, hopefully get back to the thesis I’ve been meaning to do.

 Let’s get it.