#what does that word mean???

[inkskinned]

she's singing in another room and my dog is asleep at my feet. my grandma asked me why i haven't found a man yet and i laughed. oh, you know. i like my house clean.

my girlfriend is also my man is also "my partner" if i'm in a professional setting. yesterday we went to a ren faire and a man mimed at me - you're together? and at my delighted nod, his baffled, you're gay? made me laugh. a woman with rainbow hair said i love the two of you together. you're both so beautiful it's absurd.

my dad introduced my partner as my "..... friend. or whatever" the other day. he knows we're dating. in the same way, i was never able to get my sister's husband to stop saying that's gay like it's 2008. he still uses the word fa***t, and my sister's defense of him has always been well, he's just kidding.

my lover and i dance to old music in a tiny kitchen. we judge new music together and take food critique very seriously. we watch love is blind before we fall asleep and agree that if they had a queer season, it would be bloody but also make for excellent tv. of fucking course queer people would know someone for only 2 weeks and agree to get married. what are you saying.

at a bar with friends, a man puts his hand on my wrist. got a boyfriend? and yes, i do have a boyfriend, she's amazing. i am texting her while i wander around a gas station named after geese. i am visiting a swing state for a wedding. in the candy aisle i overhear: she's actually like a lesbian it's disgusting. two teenage girls with packaged sandwiches in their hands, giggling. no literally, like. i'm not, like. okay with her being there while we're all, like, naked and changing.

my girlfriend and i tailgate, drink gin and cider out of cups. from the frat group beside us, a man corrects himself with one of his friends: bro, i mean, nonbinary entity, and it makes everyone around him laugh, myself included. he razzes his friend the same way i would have killed for at 19 years old - like nothing happened, he continues: you apply sunscreen like an alien. he does a little sassy (and fairly accurate) dance interpretation of the motion. his friend is laughing so hard they're crying.

i am lucky, i live in a safe neighborhood in a safe state. my masc passenger princess comes up from DC. i drive her for an hour to where all the leaves are a violent arrangement of color. we walk along the trails, letting autumn into our blood. in this part of the state, there's a lot of pickup trucks and trump signs. when we chastely kiss before getting into the car, i accidentally make eye contact with a woman holding her child's wrist. she looks disgusted. she looks fucking pissed.

two hours later my girl and i are eating dinner on a patio, soaking in the last warmth of new england sun before the chill of winter sets in. we are giggling and trying to talk through plastic vampire teeth. at another table, i see a young woman sit up straighter. i watch her watch us. she blushes and takes her partner's hand from across the table. shy, like the taste of evening has just become something deeper.

it's worth it for this moment, i think. my lover is still humming the same song she's been singing for four days straight and i don't want to kill her for it. her guitar is beside my bed. her toothbrush is in my bathroom. in a few moments i will make us lunch. we are lucky enough to have found each other. it is lucky enough to be in love.

[lazylittledragon]

ok someone please correct me if i'm wrong but am i weird for thinking those 'audiobooks don't count as reading' posts are ableist as fuck????

[supertaliart]

I went a little off the rails for a power-point-party, so I thought I'd share. Don't come at me about canonicity. Also yes, I spent hours using illustrator to make pose-able vector mando'ade.

Review from my friend: "I feel like I actually learned something?"

[jjkyaoi]

it’s time for me to be that one friend that is too woke, but the “vi and jayce are stupid together so they can’t get anything done” jokes are funny to an extent. i love himbo friendships more than anything. but some of the things you guys are saying about vi is crazy “i bet she can’t read because who knows what zaun’s education was” THESE COMMENTS ON THIS TIKTOK.

it’s crazy how people can watch a show like arcane, and understand the themes and still not understand how this is kind of weird??? people from zaun aren’t stupid or less than. that is the whole point. viktor comes from the undercity, jinx as well, and ekko, and they are all. canonically genius’. vi is not a stupid child. PLEASEEE stop treating her as one with your basis being her under-privilege and a few brash qualities of her personality

[thedreadvampy]

Losing my shit about this article in which a transphobic Tory was so busy panicking about existing in the vicinity of a Trans that she almost certainly misheard "jeans" as "penis" and decided that not only was this a problem with the other woman, but also that the world must be informed of this pressing danger.

"a trans woman! I had to stand directly behind her....I thought, 'this is going well', I'm handling The Situation fine'..."

translated: I saw a tall woman with broad shoulders. How would I get out of this alive? I thought. she has a PENIS. PENIS PENIS PENIS. through some force of PENIS I mean will I managed to PENIS behave normally towards her. My hands were PENIS PENIS PENIS shaking as I tried to dry them. summoning up all my PENIS courage I said 'dryer's crap innit'. she turned to me and said " yeah I'm just goiPENIS PENIS PENIS"

It's been a week and I'm still shaking. This proves trans women are the problem and I'm not weird. I'm fine. It's fine. If you think about it I'm the hero hePENIS!!!!!

very this

[lotus-pear]

whatever happens, please don’t break

[mossy-aro]

ultimately i think my insistence on aro positivity honestly is as much a political stance as a personal one.

when i say aro positivity is crucial and that i dislike doomer-ist posts that express sentiments like 'I hate being aro so much I wish I was dead instead’ it's not because I don’t think there can and should be a space for negativity and acknowledging self-hate, or the many ways being aromantic can really suck sometimes. i find that to be very important!

that being said. there is smth here about how self-hate posts are sometimes just arophobia that we inflict on ourselves. and when we put that out into the ether it (intentionally or not) can become arophobia that we inflict on other members of the community. i think there absolutely needs to be a place for negativity and the expression of anger and frustration and self loathing even - these are all good things to talk about because these are things that we experience. that being said, it can also be genuinely upsetting and triggering to people to have what is essentially arophobia shown to them and then have that be validated by other aspec people. your personal thoughts can affect your wider community on a level you may not anticipate. and i understand it i truly do! it took me so long to be able to recover from accepting being aroace - it threw my entire world off kilter and made me question everything about my place in the world.

but my insistence on aro joy and positivity is because ultimately i do believe that building is at the core essence of it all. that ultimately discussions and the purpose of community should be about construction, not destruction. and this is both a personal and a political stance. talking about how much you hate yourself and cultivating online discussions/spaces where negativity about aspec identity is the main and only theme is destructive - if that’s where we let the conversation end. these thoughts can and should be used as a vehicle to look for a path forward!

joy and positivity create a space where the focus can become on forging a path forward, on construction, on community building instead of tearing ourselves and others down with negative thoughts. it’s not productive or healthy when it stops at a place of negativity - it becomes actively destructive to the essence of community.

and i do think that this is especially poignant considering the fact that being any kind of queer, but especially aromantic (and/or asexual) means forging a path for yourself and making your own happiness where there is no obvious way forward. our communities exist mostly online (right now, anyway), there is little recognition of our existence in the real world, the effects of amatonormativity are both pervasive and actively dehumanising, and there are legal, economic and social structures in place actively making our lives more difficult. yes that all sucks! it’s good to acknowledge that. we need to in order to change it. but more importantly, that’s not the end. we are still here and our happiness, our future is for us to determine. even if we can’t change the laws or society, loving yourself and understanding aromanticism as a political identity (as well as personal), as a radical worldview, and as a protest against amatonormativity is essential for both community and personal well being. the personal is political.

tldr. i guess my point is that as a community, we should focus on building, improving, and nurturing ourselves and each other (construction) as opposed to destruction. we should recognise aromanticism and asexuality as political identities as well as personal ones and rely on community and self-love in the absence of anything else as a form of protest and political power. destruction (the recognition of everything that is wrong) is essential as a starting point - but where do we go from there? we rebuild.

[elfcollector]

DRAGON AGE: ORIGINS (2009) — developed by bioware.

[serpentface]

WARDI WRITTEN LANGUAGE (BASICS).

Couya's full name (properly 'Haidamane Couya') written formally and with common handwriting conventions.

The Wardi written language derives from earlier proto-language systems consisting exclusively of logograms without direct phonetic meaning or grammatical structure. These symbols gradually became simplified and abstracted to the point of many having little intrinsic clarity, and combined to communicate abstract concepts.

The development of a full written language did not occur independently (as very few written languages do), and its phonetic elements (namely its use of syllabograms) were largely derived the 'ancient' Burri writing system, gradually synthesized with native writing conventions, and in the contemporary forms a wholly distinct system. The language's Relatively universalized form is a very recent phenomena, developing within the past two centuries with the region's conquering/unification into a single entity.

The contemporary written language is a mixture of logograms and syllabograms. It is read from right to left and arranged in horizontal columns. The most formal variant of this system contains each character within a square outline, usually separated by a small space. This outline confers little phonetic or symbolic information beyond making distinction between syllables exceptionally clear, and can be (and often is) omitted in handwriting. The separation of words is conveyed through a narrow rectangle or line in formal contexts, and again often omitted in handwriting (instead indicated instead by a wider blank space).

The pure logograms that have been retained in this writing system tend to be those of very common words or specific concepts (most logogram characters for types of livestock, key crops, water, major body parts, etc are widely recognized and in common use). There has not yet been any attempts to fully 'formalize' the language and omit potentially unnecessary logograms, and they remain frequently used as shorthand while conveying the same semantic information.

Many of the syllabogram characters are directly derived from logograms that depicted monosyllabic words. For example, the spoken word 'gan' means 'cow', and the character for the syllable 'gan' is identical to the common logogram for 'cow'.

The name Gantoche (literally "cow-eye") could be written either fully with syllabograms as:

or through logograms as:

Both ultimately communicate the same meaning, but the former clarifies pronunciation (the words gan and atoche are contracted, it's gantoche and not gan-atoche).

It is a relatively easy written language to learn, as the pure syllabogram characters indicate their own pronunciation with little ambiguity and often have consistency to their construction (ie the character for the syllable 'man' contains most of the same elements as that for the syllable 'wan'- the dot placement in particular has indication of the vowel sounds).

The inclusion of logograms in general and many of the syllabic characters being directly imported From logograms complicates matters. These characters lack visual consistency, and can be confusing to the large swath of the public who know common logograms but not the full written language itself. Ie: the word 'ungande' meaning 'liver' will be composed of logogram-derived syllable characters for 'un' (which alone means 'hand') and 'gan' (which alone means 'cow'). Someone who is only semi-literate in common logograms may be confused at the meaning, especially since these same exact same characters may be used elsewhere on their own to indicate 'hand' or 'cow'.

One major exception to this tendency is that current religious doctrine requires established logogram characters describing God to be used in place of syllabic characters. The word for god is 'Od', and has its own unique character (as do each of the Faces, the capital F 'Face', and Its deified pronoun). The syllable 'od' [oʊd] is very common in the Wardi language, and a wholly separate character is used for the phonetic sound when it is not a reference to the deity (ie 'lion' (odo [oʊdoʊ]) does not contain the same character for God in spite of its first syllable having the exact same pronunciation). Names are a bit of a gray area (ie: the name 'Odabi' is very common and carries the meaning of 'gift/blessing from God'). Religious leadership is currently experiencing a mild schism on whether the written character for God is separated due to being wholly sacrosanct (and thus inappropriate to include in the written form of a personal name) or as more of a functional delineation of the sacred and mundane.

[rynli]

Thinking about how one of the two voices in Harry's deepest core is feminine.... Thinking about how the Skills are fragments of Harry's psyche, and he's convinced himself he's a manly-man at the moment, but clearly the Furies themselves don't all have to be male... thinking about half the Skills immediately switching to she/her the second Harry comes across the concept of gender as a construct. Wait, we can CHOOSE? Friendship ended with "this guy." "this gal" is my new gender.

[rarepairnation]

when boromir died for merry and pippin and then pippin saves faramir's life. when pippin says i offer you my service in payment for this debt. when he offers it to denethor but really it's to gondor and to boromir and to the man that denethor once was. when boromir saving pippin's life directly means that pippin saves faramir's life and literally...to boromir, that would've been enough, to have his brother live. for gondor that is enough, to have their captain returned to them.

[longmaxsilvarg]

something about the main menu for life is strange genuinely makes me wanna collapse and sob

[starry-bi-sky]

Who is the more well-adjusted twin; Damian, or Danyal? Why, it's Damian, of course!

And I have an explanation for this! But first I wanna preface this that this is just me like, rambling about this thought I have and it's not an attack on the trope as a whole. I love the Danyal Al Ghul au which is why i'm so deeply passionate about it, because I think it has a lot of potential to be explored. It's no secret that I've mentioned before that I think Danny's psychological development tends to get overlooked and underutilized in DAG aus, and the impact that growing up in an assassin league often goes ignored. This is just me further expanding on that.

Now lets set the stage! This is specifically for Danny who is adopted by the Fentons later down in life. Lets go twin au. At 10 years old, Damian goes to the Wayne Family, Danny is adopted by the Fentons (regardless of their affiliation with the League). By 14 years old, who ends up the better adjusted, more socially aware, spiritually in-tune with themselves, sibling? Why, Damian is! Why is that?

Because he has the actual support he needs compared to Danny. And I'm not talking about good or bad parents Fentons, because either way my opinion doesn't change. Damian would end up the better off twin, because, frankly, his family knows his background. They know he grew up in the League, they know what the League's teachings are, and they know he's a born and raised assassin. Knowing this, they can then help tackle and dismantle the teachings and lessons he has been given and ingrained into by the League. They may be a dysfunctional family, but they're functional enough to at least actively help deprogram all of the League's teachings that have been ingrained in Damian throughout his childhood.

Can't say the same for Danny.

Lets say Fentons here don't know his background -- and even if they do, the results may just stay the same if they play their cards wrong, -- Danny's now just been thrown into the deep end of a pool and is essentially being told sink or swim. Regardless of how he got there -- undercover, faked death, etc -- he has no proper support. He knows the League is meant to be secret, he's not gonna speak on it for various reasons. Whether it be some still lingering loyalty, fear of harm, or whatever. Whatever the reason is, he does not have a proper support system in the Fentons, no matter how nice they are. They can only tackle the surface level stuff and whatever Danny allows them to see -- if Danny ever lets them see it at all. For what do assassins do when they don't want to be caught? They hide. Sometimes in plain sight.

"But Jazz--" Jazz is a child. She is 2 years older than Danyal and no better at giving him a proper support system than the two adult Fenton parents, even with parentification. We don't know when she got into psychology or how long she'd been studying it by the time Danny's 14. We just know she's really into it. Even then, Jazz is not a licensed or reliable therapist, or even an experienced or implied good therapist, and should not be used as one either. It's a disservice to her character to reduce her down to 'supporting female emotional crutch'. Besides, therapy only works on people who want to get better. Danny, who'd be hiding who he really is, has very little incentive to want to, or to even think something is wrong with his way of thinking, even with exposure to the outside world.

When people's beliefs are outright challenged, they tend to double down on them, and Jazz canonically has a habit of psychoanalyzing her family and declaring what she thinks is the problem -- regardless of whether or not she's right about it. Jazz would get into psychology, try and psychoanalyze Danny, and all it would do is cause him to clam up, shut into himself further, and throw up even more walls so that she can't figure out that he has been lying this whole time. It would do more harm than good, and would actively hinder any progress he'd make in trying to open up to them. Roads and good intentions and all that.

That being said, I think Danny's development and dismantling of the League's teachings would be slower than Damian's. Much slower. Because he would be the one having to pick apart everything and figure out what is right, what is wrong, what he wants to keep, and what he wants to toss. Everything he unlearns would be stuff he has to unlearn himself. If he even gets to that point at all -- depending on his experiences, he very well could not change at all, or change very little. The League acts as a purge for humanity, meant to reign in their hubris and retain balance, they just also happen to be assassins for hire. Danny's time spent in Amity Park could as well strengthen his belief in their teachings just as much as it could weaken it, especially if it goes as canon and he gets bullied.

Regardless, being tossed to a civilian family as someone who is very much not a civilian, without any support, would be actively detrimental to Danny's overall mental health and development. Especially to strangers like the Fentons. Damian was closed off and standoffish even with blood family, and it took him time to open up to them -- Danny, with the Fentons, would be even more so. He doesn't know them, he doesn't trust them, he has no rhyme or reason to open up to them, and since the Fentons don't actually know him, they can't help him the way he needs. Once "Danny Fenton" is made, he has even less reason to open up. So long as Danyal allows it, they will only ever know Danny, and they'll never know Danyal.

TL:DR the Fentons aren't the better family option just because they're civilians, and actually that makes them the worser option between the two because they can't give Danny the proper support he needs. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

[deoidesign]

I met the me who made different choices

[epiphainie]

i've just finished my s7 rewatch and it's kinda so funny to me how much discourse people created over every bucktommy interaction when their whole arc boils down to tommy being patient and vulnerable with buck and showing up for him. like when you are not wearing shipper goggles under the name of "analysis" and don't try to reverse-engineer every word and look and shot with utmost bad faith, that's what it is. a simple and sweet story of a new exciting relationship with a guy who's understanding and willing to show up. literally the two things buck needs from a relationship but never had with his previous love interests. they are kinda sickeningly sweet and well-communicating actually lol