#what is the best way forward

[topbestwaysvideo]

Top 24 Unstoppable Ways to Crush Your New Year’s Resolutions

The new year is already here, it's time to start thinking about your goals and aspirations for the year ahead. Whether you're hoping to lose weight, save money, or start a new career, the key to success is in planning. That's why we've put together this list of the top 24 unstoppable ways to crush your New Year's resolutions.

[sucre-blue]

every wednesday i fantasize about running away to clown school

[cubbyyyy]

the fact that neil chose andrew out of them all is so dear to me. that andrew chose neil out of them all is so dear to me. that they chose each other is so dear to me. and at the same time it seems inevitable? like of course they chose each other, like of course no one else would be possible. they are what the other needs and that’s why they last. they are so compatible it’s scary.

and the fact that nora said if andrew didn’t have neil he never would’ve gotten happiness proves my point. I know some want to have the whole “you don’t need anyone to be happy” kind of mindset but in my book you’ll always gonna need people. It’s inevitable. and not finding the one who gets you, can make you miserable. It’s hard to find, but it’s so so sweet when you do and I’m so glad andrew got blessed with it. He got the one. and through hard work (therapy etc) he made him last. neil never became the one who got away because andrew worked hard enough to not self sabotage anymore. he learned to recognize neil as a good thing, an important thing and eventually he learns that neil feels the same and will never be the one to hurt him. he won’t be like tilda. so they make it last. and that’s everything.

[pianokantzart]

Even as a fully grown echidna teen/man, he still is babey deep inside

He is still that traumatized child trying to grow up as fast as he can. He's that kid left utterly abandoned, whose parting words with his father were promises that he would bring honor to his clan one day. He's the last of the echidnas, run ragged trying to fill the gap of the entire civilization and he's sixteen. He doesn't even know that he's still a kid. He should be at the club.

[yellowjackets-1996]

(do you love me like that?) you're a reckless driver (I'm a reckless driver) and one day it will kill us if I —

[cherrise-rose]

imagine a small town having an annual mechanical bull riding contest but for overdue pregnant people

[yuseirra]

It's been years since I check the tags for fandoms I'm in because I get a bit nervous...I get influenced very easily, and the way how other people feel about things affect me in a massive way, whether it be both positive or negative, so I keep to myself and I tend to read and think about things alone. I got invites to discussion, but I couldn't talk so much, I'm really sorry about that. I really appreciate it!/// I was happy... It's just that I function a bit differently regarding what I enjoy. As much as I love putting my ideas out there, I just enjoy introspecting about things by myself rather than having debates.

I'm really grateful for all the kindness I've been receiving, I love all the sweet tags too. It keeps me fueled!

So today I braced myself a lil and checked out the hikaai tag here right!

AM I CARRYING THAT TAG???? I shouldn't say "carry", maybe...that's being too full of myself, sorry. but.. Wow.. I think I literally took over it... OH MY GOSH...

I really wish I could be a better artist!! Or could lay out some things that are worth reading... I really am trying my best though!! I have the love. I've been doing this to every single thing I get passionate about, I'm sure! There is a period where I get new ideas every single day. That's something you can't obtain even if you want to. It's been really fun lately as well as it having been tense. Really tense. It's scary because I hate to be unsure and wrong... But I still talk a lot.. And that's pretty new of me to do so. I usually just stick to drawing..maybe it's because it's that intriguing. This series is pain but I guess that's what's stimulates me to try and get a grasp and figure just what exactly things are going for.

With episode Aigis coming out today, (yay!) I'd love to hop back to drawing more persona 3 art(that's a great game) and feel an immersion towards it, draw more fanarts of that lovely fanfic I found once again(the writer deserves so much from me;;) but I also really wish...that I'd come to love this ship till the end. I genuinely see the potential it can have. I mean what I draw, I don't spend time and effort on things I don't feel about. Feelings are my everything~ To those of you who enjoy it, I'm thankful to have you with me. It's been helping me a lot!! I feel you'd all like p3 too? That game deals with loss and I personally think shuyuka does have this similar vibe w this ship to a degree, you wish someone back no matter the cost. There is that desperation and longing and I always fall for ships where someone cares so much for another.

[villainanders]

Marketing is in many ways the biggest translation of my skills and interests to a job that actually makes money. However I hate corporations and advertising is a blight upon the world and I spend my days at best making the CEO rich while contributing nothing else to society

[hadesoftheladies]

hate going for christian weddings sometimes because i always see the prettiest women with the ugliest men, the sermon is always some shit about wives being slaves (but not like bad slavery, mutual slavery except the husband is a benevolent master which makes it okay) and making babies for their husband, the music is always lame, the mc is always weird and obnoxious, and older women keep fucking asking me when it's gonna be my turn and never take no for an answer.

[britneyshakespeare]

i feel bad for raquel lee bolleau and i feel like what she's saying about the lack of transparency behind quiet on set is a bigger issue that the consumers of this type of content don't want to talk about or criticize. social media has led to a huge boom in tragedy porn and trauma porn about the entertainment industry but especially the children's entertainment industry, especially especially from the eras when the largest demographic in that audience were consuming it themselves.

it's already been problematic in itself that there is an oversaturation of unresearched and repetitive videos on the exploitation of former child stars. it seems like the creators and audience don't often ask themselves "have we gotten enough of this? do we need another take on it? is another video full of dan schneider rumors and gossipy forum posts really adding to the public discourse?" i don't know quite at what point it becomes exploitative that this content continues to be made, and be evergreen in social media algorithms. the volume, the reach, and the general lack of quality control are the evil triad. because we are far past the point where i really believe everyone consuming this stuff cares about exploited children. there's far too many people gawking and not reevaluating the systems of power involved. or, to put it more concretely: how many times do we all need to watch those clips of ariana grande squeezing the potato and spilling water on her neck? at what point is this just personally disrespectful and retraumatizing for the victims that for the most part we, the consumers of internet content, are claiming to advocate for?

quiet on set is the first time traditional media got involved in this niche. there is still a lot of value in some of the discoveries made by the series. but it does not have completely clean hands in this either. it does not feel like everyone involved in making the executive decisions cared nearly enough about the vulnerability of former child stars they recruited to share their stories, or hell, whose stories were told without their involvement, such as amanda bynes and racquel in episode 5. these people did not even give statements.

the focus of this docuseries was far too broad and not coherent enough at the end of the day. and they did not give enough support to all of the people they roped in to tell their stories about childhood trauma. i have a hard time trying not to be completely cynical about its whole production, because i really want to believe that many of the people who worked on it do care. not every individual involved knew or had control over the injustices that happened in its own production. but the executives? fuck em. they greenlit this thing, and probably incentivized the creators to make these episodes as fast as possible, because they knew it would be a cash cow. something as sensitive as THIS series should not be so poorly produced just because it will be a guaranteed smash.

[pandora15]

life is cruel.

it's tragic, horrific, and unfair. it gives us the worst of things, causes us to feel and experience things that are so unspeakably painful that sometimes I can't even. I can't even.

and it seems even more cruel in those moments of pain and grief and loss when you see something beautiful, like fall colors, or the color of the sky at sunset, or how the holidays typically are meant to bring joy to people but all you can think about now is that every year when this time of year comes, you'll just think about how tragic it is.

and cruel.

and horrific.

and unfair.

and beautiful.

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[lilcathsmith]

Greg in every episode of CSI (87/328) • Down The Drain •

[novadreii]

rewatched arrival for the hundredth time. this movie never fails to gut punch me with its approach to determinism. louise embracing her future that she knows every moment of, despite the tremendous loss and pain it contains, with open arms. she doesn't hesitate, or ruminate on how she can try and change it. she accepts it all, the good and the bad, because what she gains is worth it, so many times over for her. she steels herself against a certain future and runs forward to meet it all, to love, learn, and lose, and trusts and leans on herself to live through it all. because that's what life is; it's the joy and the suffering. to try and isolate the joy alone is madness, futility in its purest definition.

comparing her line of thinking to a palindrome (how she named her daughter, hannah), the movie kept emphasizing, "it's the same backwards as it is forwards." it doesn't matter if you can see the end; life is the same whether you live it "forwards" (without knowledge of the future) or "backwards" (with foresight). it doesn't change the significance of your life experiences; to try and avoid certain future pain just because you have the knowledge of it is a zero sum game. you think you win because you avoided pain, but you also avoided the joy that preceded it. the metamorphosis. so you still lose if you try to win, and vice-versa.

all you can do is rush forward and take it all head-on. see this whole beautiful mess as your one most precious gift; this one life, this one chance, a laughably miniature blip on the colossus that is linear time, to experience all there is to feel before you return back to an eternity without perception. it's all worth it, because only in living a full-fledged life open to everything it has to offer does the experience of living turn out to be greater than the sum of its parts; it's in trying to beat the system (avoid pain) that we actually lose.

"if you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?"

"maybe i'd say what i feel more often. i...i don't know."

[b-blushes]

saturday quest is catsitting in the most slug mode way possible 👍

[emblazonet]

Dragonquest

Ok I finally finished it!

Warning for frank spoilers about a half-century old book.

There really wasn't much questing, was there? Does the title refer to the very end, with F'nor going to the Red Star? Or did the publishers title it Dragon+rando-fantasy word-here, to get people interested? Because the whole plot was a bunch of people talking to each other with varying degrees of success.

I think it's a miracle I finally sorted who everyone was by the end of it. I can now tell apart F'nor and F'lar. I hate those names so much.

Things I liked:

Lessa is allowed to be judgemental and wrong about things. She's still a bitch! She's still talented at manipulating people! She's still respected by people! Love that actually

Lessa and F'lar as a couple, actually. THE SNARK and then all those tender touches betraying their deeper feelings? UGH

FIRE LIZARDS

A bunch of leaders of the land squabbling like school children over who gets to look in a telescope!!! PERFECT SCENE 11/10

The status is never quo. Seriously, McCaffrey establishes something and then in the next chapter cheerfully upends it. The political structure of the land keeps shifting, people's opinions shift (or don't) to accomodate technological rediscoveries or innovations, the friction between Oldtimers and everyone else makes so much sense and I'm so glad that's the plot point book 2 opens on!

And F'nor actually Did The Thing and went to the Red Star! That was super epic!!

Dragons. Draaaagons. Dragondragondragon. I love them all.

Things I was significantly less fond of:

Why is Kylara's entirely plotline Like That? Why have her slut shamed when she could have just been written as greedy and foolish??? Kylara can be an awful person that's cool, but the way she was written was Bad and didn't have to be like that. She could've been an interesting foil for Lessa (and Brekke I guess)... but she wasn't. We don't even find out how she feels about her dragon dying!

Brekke, to be honest. She's boring af, her romance with F'nor is trite, and the most exciting part of her narrative was when her dragon died. Rip Wirenth poor thing, but that dragon queen battle scene WAS riveting, so I did enjoy that. I wanted to like Brekke but there was no hook, nothing that made me feel anything about her one way or the other

There are too many male characters doing stuff and not enough ladies, but honestly for sci fi of that time period it's not the worst offender

I don't know why everyone on Pern is repulsed by grubs so much tbh?

In general though, I liked Dragonquest! But it did... it did... drag on. (Yes, I went there. Deal with it. :3)

It had some middle book pacing issues. I enjoy that it didn't have a traditional three-part structure, but the beginning was slooooow and I didn't have much investment with the many many (mostly male) characters... and it was hard to keep up with them! The description is quite sparse, so it's hard to attach any sensory memory to the characters. I should have flipped to the back more to refresh on who was the lord of what, etc.

But yeah, generally very interesting. I like the conflicts that happen most of the time, I think the central conflict of Pern vs Thread/spores is actually really interesting and such a refreshing change from a lot of fantasy I've read lately. This book is truly about a lot of logistical conversations, and I appreciate that. Flawed but interesting.

7/10 looking forward to the next installments.