#this is not a failure but a part of the process

[freetheshit-outofyou]

This won't be a popular opinion, but it will be a truthful one from 3 generations of ranchers and farmers: We, the United States Farmers and Ranchers, could not sustain the type of crop and cattle yield to feed 340 Americans. Would could not feed the estimated extra 46.2 million people that are here on vacation, here illegally, here as students and or part of the work force. The United States could not sustain itself in perfect times, it would be disastrous if there were crop failures, livestock failures, uncooperative weather patterns, fuel shortages, worker shortages, strikes, any number of events that would stop things going from the ranches and farms to your table. I want you to think about that. If the Unites States only relied on itself for just food and one part of that system stops it would cause famine like we have not seen since the 1930's. At that point every Rancher and Farmer would be taking care of their own, eating the livestock and crops they grew, not you. Furthermore, Even if the United States could somehow convert all land not currently used into lands for crops and livestock, where does the water come from? Where is that infrastructure to get large amounts of water into the central deserts of Nevada or turning the Alkali rich soils on Utah and Arizona into fertile crop lands? Are we clear cutting the forests of Washington, Oregon and California to make new farm lands? This is not realistic by any stretch of the imagination. I wish it were but we are just to many mouths and not enough ways to feed them domestically. We are not the only Nation with this issue. I have been all over the world and as much as we all hate to admit it we all rely on the world to feed each other. Below are some images and sources to help solidify why this is almost an impossibility. I am more isolationist than most, and I can see this can't work.

Source

Source

I have not even added crop and livestock rotation on lands to allow them to recover. Or the fact that some crops and livestock CANNOT just grow or live where ever we would like them too. The only way I could ever see this as a real possibility was if we went into a "Wartime" mode where all recourses were poured into this effort. Even then, as I already said, one snag in the process and it all falls apart. I don't care if it's low livestock birthrates one season, lowered than expected crop yields for consumption AND for seed for the following season. Not enough rain, Winters to long, Fall comes to early, blights, bugs, a million variables. Let's not forget that when the entire Nations is dependent on the Mom and Pop farmers and ranchers to live, mom and pop become slaves to the system so the Eloi can eat.

[catras-breakup-song]

how do you feel about the whole "you always wanted more" line that got cut? at first i was wondering why they did that because adora didn't want more until it made me think "huh, what if prime was just running on catra's memories and didn't actually know adora?" but i'm curious as to what you think

OH MY GOD I AM SO GLAD YOU ASKED THIS. i am such a sucker for the cut STC script. back in late 2020 & early 2021 i had a twitter layout based on “that little spot on the roof that only they knew about” because S3 is my favorite:

even better, i have another old twitter fancam saved from around that time too that used that screenshot of the script in the beginning. it was by the username yoosene but is now long gone, so i reuploaded it to imgur here (the hands part, i’m going insane…)!

anyway, as for interpretations, it was absolutely to manipulate & guilt-trip adora. i recently saw someone say (i don’t remember where though, sorry) that he was torturing both of them by setting up that nasty fight against both of their wills and had planned to kill catra all along — despite saying he wouldn’t right after she rescued glimmer and was imprisoned for it, in my opinion there was an unspoken “yet” even though he did technically say that word but you know what i mean; “you will be of use to me, and then everyone from your blighted planet, including yourself, will be destroyed.”

that’s the thing about what the show was trying to convey through her stay on prime’s ship via glimmer’s desperate pleas, isn’t it? her illusion of power was only ever temporary. once she no longer had anything of value to serve, what would she be worth? how could she have genuinely believed that he wanted to save her, of all living beings, from the curse of humanity & will of consciousness? what makes one individual different to an omnipotent god compared to countless others across the universe throughout space and time? i truly believe that he was subtly mocking her when he talked of her being “exalted, raised up above the other wretched creatures of [her] home world.”

i was actually trying to find another five by five takes quote about this, because mentioning them is always an obligation for me, but surprisingly i didn't really find anything about how catra had worked her way up to prime's recognized single subordinate (only that moment of reflection afterward, which is just this entire short video), and was under the false impression with a cocky & confident attitude that her position meant something for her safety & survival; i'm mostly referring to this moment:

the horde's the horde...even in space. as long as i'm of value to horde prime, i've got a place in this world. i can work my way up here, just like i did before.

actually y’know what… i’m going to tag @horde-princess because this is starting to dive into religious meta which is like… her whole gimmick thingy. we would be blessed (pun intended) to see your take on this writing that never made it to the show, if you haven’t given it already!

now this is veering too far off from the original point after getting sidetracked. the tone of those quotes in the alternate script is (fake) pity, and horde prime was entertained by the struggles of mere mortals. to make adora a failure of what she represented would surely force her to give up she-ra to him, because what would even be the point anymore of living up to expectations if she couldn’t save catra first & foremost (that’s something that she struggled with since initially leaving the horde over three years ago due to how catra made her feel about supposedly breaking their childhood promise… but it’s a story for another post)?

i don’t doubt that your thought process is at least partially right too though, anon. prime didn’t read adora’s mind thoroughly at any point, so it’s entirely possible that he just read off catra’s intense feelings of abandonment & betrayal. that being said, if he really did see all as he claimed, maybe he was able to recreate an objectively accurate collection of events and knows what really happened and what the intentions behind certain actions were. i also wonder if catra secretly knew deep down that adora’s defection wasn’t directly about her but just couldn’t admit it until she had time to deeply reflect on it during “corridors.”

i’ll leave this messy, unorganized post with an amazingly relevant gif set made by an editor whose work on here i really enjoy:

as i said a long time ago, you just had to be there on november 19th 2020 when that excerpt was released because the hype was crazy!

[questforgalas]

Constantly reminding myself that healing and recovery are not linear, that they’re filled with rolling highs and steep tumbling downs, and sometimes the downs feel like falling into a cavern that I’m cursed to lay on the floor of for eternity, but even the small act of simply sitting up from the floor is a step up. Standing from the floor is a step up. Stepping towards the wall is a step up. And soon I’ll find the hand holds and the foot holds and will start climbing again. And sometimes during that climb, I might slip. I might fall. But I’ll grab on again and climb again. Little by little. And eventually, in hours, days, weeks, months, or maybe even a year, I’ll reach the flat surface on the other side of that cavern, and pull myself up. And I’ll walk straight for a bit, maybe walk up a hill, maybe stumble here and there. And maybe I’ll meet another cavern in the future, but it’ll be ok. Because just sitting up from the cavern floor is a step up.

[brown-little-robin]

it went fine yesterday btw :}

[creepyscritches]

Like, I grew up with a single parent who went MILES beyond expectations to secure me medical care and it was a horrible, demeaning process at every step! You could NOT "good behavior" your way to the system working. There were countless moving finish lines and a faceless wall of state insurance that did not care how often or how high they asked you to jump.

My father was not interested in paying for my health insurance after he dropped my mother and me like hot stones. So my mother did not have many choices when it became clear I was not well. I spent most of my early life undiagnosed and severely decompensated and, you guessed it, extremely suicidal. It wasn't until I was 26 or 27 that I experienced a day without pain, and I fought my way there the entire time.

I managed to graduate high school with honors, cords for the art honor society, and with all of my college-level English knocked out my senior year through dual-enrollement. I also taught intro level art at the high school, student-taught art at the middle school, student tutored trigonometry, and spent my remaining time in the art rooms completing the soldering on a giant stained glass installment we made for the school. Through this time, I also learned as many art techniques as I could (film photography and lost wax sculpture being my favorites). I also worked most holidays and school breaks in a kennel, spending 12 hour shifts handling non-social dogs.

By senior year, I was stashing coffee throughout my destinations each day. I was so tired I couldn't sit up. My body hurt, but doctors we could see would simply brush me off as a lazy teenager. I had a tumor under my tongue that kept returning and becoming more expensive to address. I had to lose a rear molar due to infection that eroded my jaw bone -- it took 2 years for the bone to regrow before I could entertain any options of replacing the tooth. I am 15. I am 16. I am 17.

I am 18. Despite having no money, I finally get some payoff for my efforts. I am awarded a full ride scholarship, I even get enough money back each semester to fully cover my books. I have to work a campus job as a part of the agreement and I spend 6hrs a week manning the liberal arts front desk between my +12hrs of classes. That's fine. I knew I was never going to have an easy road to education. I join the honors college and place my science + language credits there. My 7pm biology lab is the only reason I did not work my second job one day a week.

I am 18. I am working. I am learning. I am extremely ill but have been conditioned to call myself lazy, unmotivated, and the reason for my failures. I am not ill, not to me. I am 18. I work an overnight, 16 hour shift for Black Friday. I do not see family this year. My tumor returns. I quit my second job in December because I could not talk to customers after surgery. The doctor tells me I will have a scar as long as my jaw if it returns again.

I am 18. I am in pieces. My partner breaks up with me because I do not give them enough attention. I work until 10pm every day and spend the preceding 12 hours in rigorous college courses. Every day but my 7pm Biology lab, but I am too tired to spend time with someone that day. I do not have room in me to care about this now too. I finish my second semester and do not return. I cannot move my body and I cannot get accommodations because I cannot afford a diagnosis. I leave the full ride behind.

I am 19. I am supporting myself with freelance art. My body suffers deeply for this. I cannot get care. I find a chiropractor who will see me for $50 a visit and she saves me from killing myself if I'm honest. I begin teaching myself the ICD-9. I get certified and get a job the same month as my certification.

I am 20. I have moved out, my mother was moving as well. I am working, still sick. I cannot get care anywhere now as I am over 18, under 26, but my parent with insurance will not cover me. I work at my job for a year before I am fired for health complications. As a contractor, I did not get benefits or protections. This is just the way it is, they explain to me.

I am 21. I have picked up a new job, still contract over a year in despite the promise of full-time after 8 months. The job holds my insurance over my head like a carrot. I start to lose motion in my left arm. Pain now wakes me up on a nightly basis. I threaten to quit, they transition me from "external" to "internal" contractor. No benefits.

I am 21. I have forced my employer to hire me full-time. I am paid significantly less than my peers, despite experience. I get benefits. I pay $4000 out of pocket, but get my first diagnosis of narcolepsy. I do not get adequate medication until 4 years later.

I am 22. Physical therapy had been trying to fix my left arm, but things keep worsening. I receive a couple of painful steroid injections over my ulnar nerve (between the elbow). These do not work, so I am brought in for an ultrasound guided injection where the needle is woven between my bones and nurses physically hold me in place per protocol. This does nothing, but it is one of the most agonizing procedures I have ever had. I am rushed into a rheumatologist's roster after lesions in my bone marrow are found on MRI. The MRI took 3 attempts over a month as the pose required would reduce me to delirious levels of pain.

I am 22. I am told I have an autoimmune disease that has been running rampant for years. I begin oral chemotherapy. I vomit constantly. I do not improve. My doctor does not believe me when I say I cannot tolerate this medication. I do not get a name for my diagnosis, no matter how I press. I have multiple conditions submitted to insurance, but my doctor claims it is to get the different medications covered.

I am 27. I am accepted into Vanderbilt's cutting edge rheumatology department. I have SLE and my previous doctor's regimen had been consistently worsening my baseline condition. I am $15,000 in debt for medicine that ultimately was poisoning me.

I am 29 now. I have a body for the first time in my life. The opportunities I have now are unbelievable. The opportunities I missed are devastating. My body and health have been used as bartering chips my entire life. I am a "lucky" outcome. I cannot swallow this pill that this is the only way people can live here. No one will be demeaned like I was if I have any control over it. I will never minimize the incredible change the ACA brought to everyone here.

I cannot stress enough that the gap between "better than nothing insurance" and "no healthcare at all" is literally one big enough for your coffin. That is unacceptable, I refuse this. The only reason I have been motivated to learn the bureaucratic bullshit required for American health care is to shovel this gap closed, one shovel of dirt at a time. YEAH, I would love to be a middle school art teacher but I think I have been changed too much from these experiences to walk away from the state of American health care.

I find talent to help me and I protect it, elevate it, and encourage it to multiply. I have a mentor helping me do the same. I am learning the ACA industry still, mostly to identify problem points around me. I am 29, I am building like-minded spaces around me. I refuse to see another generation live like mine and those before. Sign up for the ACA.

Growing up pre-ACA radicalized me soooo much lol like I will not pander to arguments that deprioritize access to medical care at all as an adult

[coquelicoq]

i fucking love prereading. getting documents about what's going to be discussed in a meeting and reading them and then going to the meeting and having context for all the things that are happening. if i could do this in all areas of life i would. send me a list of the words i'm going to need the definition of in order to understand what you will be talking about. give me a rundown of what topics might come up during this social encounter. provide detailed documentation of what to expect in a new setting. i will read the fuck out of that shit.

[muirmarie]

I got the screenshot right before I went to sleep last night =)

I know this will seem like a lot to some people and very little to some others haha, but! It's silly to compare it to anyone else, since we all write in different fandoms over the years and write different types and lengths and amounts of fics.

So this is really just me thinking about the number itself, and like. Kinda wild that 30,000 times someone had pushed a little button to say they liked one of my fics!

Kissing all your faces xoxoxo

[kausijuoppo]

Final experiment

[blueminuet]

Apparently you can’t put two videos in one post on this godforsaken webbed site, here’s the blooper reel for the other post I just made.

Anyway, here is the main post.

[jvzebel-x]

🦋

[journey-to-the-attic]

We know what goes on between them in DDVD, but would Lucifer and Zhao ever take an interest in each other in mainline JTTA?

it's not an impossibility! if they're compatible in ddvd, they'd still be in jtta, since zhao is still very much the same person at his core - the main difference is that, in ddvd, zhao doesn't have the time to make the mistakes he does in jtta, since he ends up in the devildom. ultimately he is still the same pathetic little man who is full of love but never knows how to express it

it'd take a while for them to actually see each other in that light, though - it'd only really become viable once zhao is at least significantly on his way to making up for how lonely ik's home life has been. before that, lucifer's disdain in regards to it would stop him from entertaining the fact that he finds zhao kind of cute

also in ddvd, i'd say it's only after getting down to the devildom that zhao realises he also likes men, so zhao in baseline jtta is even MORE repressed about being bi - which is another hurdle he's gonna have to cross before he even thinks about the fact he might have an interest in that demon dude who's adopted his kid

(also if we want to be sappy perhaps it's just a matter of zhaolu finding each other in every reality )!

[cartoon-skeleton]

im fucking fighting demons as if i didnt ACTIVELY CHOOSE to write and draw an entire comic, make a series of giant oil paintings, construct an elaborate idea for my senior project involving a human-size marionette and a live feed camera and an insane amount of portraits, take a class where i have to write a fucking play for the final, and take another class where i have to analyze 208083287 movies per week this semester. like how am i mad at anyone or anything other than myself LOL

[raplinesmoon]

i think the thing that no one tells you about being forced into being a high achieving child/teen is how much it comes to fuck you over later in life when you can’t do anything without holding yourself to an insane level of perfectionism and then you realize it’s basically leeched all the fun out of any hobbies you created for yourself and left you with a shell of a personality

[the-cat-at-the-theatre-door]

Thinking about Deuteronomy again, being that first point of contact for most cats in being welcomed into their family, newborns and new additions alike, but I'm thinking specifically about cats who were perhaps born into their group, left, and *then* came back, and how those are usually situations where Deuteronomy can sort of...tell if they'll be back when they do leave. He can't say anything about it, but he knows. Cats who know him very well can almost catch the expression that indicates one way or the other when he's informed of their leaving if he believes they'll be back. And - outside of the occasional anomaly - he's usually right about it.

He remembers, distantly, holding a little grey queenkit in his arms during one of his visits years and years ago, fresh faced and lovely, thinking: "This one will do big things" - not great things, not even potentially successful things, but big things nonetheless. He remembers a whisper of her little voice filled with confidence fading suddenly into silence; remembers thinking he hoped she would eventually find whatever it was she couldn't here, that she would find her way back when it was time, carefully avoiding the even stare of her mother as he passed her back.

And when he holds that little grey queen in his arms decades later, just when he thought he'd been wrong, only a little bigger, the sharp curves of her bones jutting from her fur, face so much older now, he sees that little one again, and smiles. Murmurs: "Welcome home", before he passes her onto the stars, hoping she finds her way back again to make up for lost time.

[garciapimienta]

Barcelona are young and exciting. But Barcelona are also still naive and inexperienced. Just like their coach. (Domagoj Kostanjsak)

[mortalityplays]

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.