#what is the science behind it

[patriciavetinari]

I genuinely don't know what's wrongn with me. I'm trying to fogure this our. First I thought I was wronged and now I feel ashamed of my horrible luck with people. People who call themseves my friends all seem to have out of sight out of mind attitude with me.

Noone in rela life seems to remeber I exist. If it's not me trying to organize a meetup – they don't text me, they don't ask me to their houses or to have a coffee on a weekend. And if it is me tugging on them and suggesting things – in most cases they are Busy even if I text a month in advance or they are hanging out with Better Friends.

It's not even about getting set up for a date anymore. I'm genuinely freaking out that I'm secretly a horrible person that noone wants me unless it's work-related where most my acquaintances these days come from.

Is it me not being on social media? Is it me not being able to give them my insta where they could comment on my photo of a coffee I'm getting? Is it me being opinionated?

I'm doing fucking everything I ever heard as an advice on being personable charming agreeable people-person. I notice their interests, I smile and give compliments and give praise when warranted and make sure all proper people get proper credit for their achievements, I recommend things I know about and am curious about things they can recommend, I've had one person not believe me saying I'm a lonely introvert, I look at baby pictures and congratulate people sincerely on getting their house or having their wedding, I have colleague who shares stories about her teenager kids and I listen and I offer advice and symathy. I'm fat and have been fat as a child so I had to be a clown to be accepted so I can make people cry with my jokes and I know it's not faked and it doesn't matter.

And yet none of those people want me elsewhere. Even if we have each other on whatsapp and with some we are even in group chats, but if it's not me tugging and timidly asking if they'd like to go somewhere sometime, maybe check out that new coffee place – it's radio silence. I try to start a concersation on how Someone is – I get an answer that they're fine, busy, and nothing else, not even a question back, no details, no offer to discuss over a drink or even have a bloody phone call just to chat away.

Noone tugs on me, noone asks me out, noone wants to make plans, noone wants me at their houses or in their existing friend groups, noone even sends any memes or anything. Nothing that I was told would happen if I learned to make friends.

I don't understand what is so horrible about me or what am I doing wrong or not enough of. Do I need an instagram account to be considered easier to reach or what? What is the secret that I'm missing?

[starchaserwrites]

@jegulus-microfic / february 17: soup / word count: 428

When the first symptoms of a cold start to kick in while he's at work, Regulus knows he's fucked. Sore throat, chills and fatigue begin to attack relentlessly. Still, being used to taking care of himself in this kind of situation, he doesn't feel it necessary to cause a fuss by telling someone or leaving work early. It's a big mistake, because when James sees him come home at 6:30 p.m., pale, sweaty and burning with fever, he rushes to help him into the flat.

"Baby, what happened?" he asks in a worried tone.

"I think I caught a cold."

Without asking any more questions, James quickly carries him bridal style into the bedroom and gently lays him down on the bed and then helps him into his pyjamas. They've been living together for almost four months now, so it takes the older man a couple of minutes to find the thermometer considering they've never needed it before, but when he finally finds it and it reads 39°C it's enough for his boyfriend to forbid him to get out of bed, not that he's planning on disobeying.

Half an hour later when Regulus is dozing off after having taken a paracetamol and having 5 slices of potato on his forehead and temples (the ancient secret of Hispanic mothers for fever according to James), his boyfriend re-enters the room leaving something on the bedside table.

"Mi amor, you need to eat something, I made some soup for you," is what he says as he gently strokes his cheek. 

Regulus opens his eyes slowly, thankful that James only left the lamp light on, and settles into a half-sitting position on the bed. The thing is, when the older man sets the tray with the bowl of soup in front of him, Regulus feels his eyes water.

“Te amo”, it's written on the edge of the bowl with the letters of the alphabet soup, and it might seem like a ridiculous thing to cry about, but he's never had someone care for him so lovingly before, even though he probably looks like shit right now.

"Can I kiss you?" asks the love of his life.

"But you can get infected too." 

James just shrugs his shoulders and gives him several soft kisses on his lips and cheeks causing a smile to break through his tears.

"Now eat, yes? You need to do it to get better."

Maybe being sick isn't so bad.

A few days later James also catches a cold and Regulus nurses the shit out of him.

[j-ustkeepgliding]

avs @ leafs - jan 13 '24

[dogboots]

boyfriend full of facts

[funnyrobot]

ok. the skins are canon i guess.

[cannibal-nightmares]

let's make trouble in the dream world, we'll hijack heaven with another memory now; i make the most of the turning tide, it just split what's left of the burning silence

[sylvrndoodles]

A scene from What Moves the Dead (by @tkingfisher) that has been ringing in my head since I read it ( ˙꒳​˙ )

[calkale]

im actually so fucking mad i get why no one else in my family went to uni this shit is so unfair

[rins-rambles]

Come and stargaze

We graduated from Stampede into StarGays, we are so back

[evermoredeluxe]

sports are So Stressful

[veinsfullofstars]

🛸 Unidentified friend-shaped object🛸 

(ID: Kirby series fanart of Shadow Kirby interacting with Doc. Top left - SK wearing the Spark hat, giving off arcs of electricity and running for his life as Doc chases after him in his UFO, a metal claw grabber extended from the front, a thought bubble over his head showing a Charge Tank. Top right - SK flying away in Doc’s UFO, sticking his tongue out and waving cheekily down at the bespectacled rat, who hops up and down in steaming anger. Bottom right - Doc hovering in his UFO, a flexible metal arm with a gloved hand at the end extending from the underside and reaching for SK, in his own gold-and-gray UFO form, who looks up at the hand in surprise. Bottom left - Doc standing professorially in front of a projection screen covered in scribbles and simplified images of his UFO, blabbering on while SK, sitting in front of him, rubs his head in clear confusion. END ID.)

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 (you’re here!) | Part 6 | Part 7 | Compilation

Sketch started btw 12/23 - 05/24, render started 05/28/24, finished 05/31/24.

[nonstandardrepertoire]

as a Jewish transsexual, the Jewish ethno-nationalist¹ sales pitch has always left me cold.² over and over again, i've heard people plugging the State of Israel offer some form of the following: "history teaches that we can never fully trust non-Jews with political power to protect Jews; the only way to make sure Jewish people are always safe is to create and maintain a state where Jewish people have the political power, so we can look out for ourselves"

but the thing is, the worst transphobic harassment i've experienced in my life has come from Jews. i don't think this says anything about the relative transphobia of Jews vs non-Jews, anymore than the fact that most of my birthday presents come from New Yorkers says anything about the relative generosity of Californians, but still. the people who followed me out of the subway filming me while yelling transphobic abuse were Jewish. two of the most relentless boosters of the current wave of transphobia in the US — Ben Shapiro and Chaya Raichik — are Jewish. i should be safe in a state run by such people?

and the obvious response is to say that, well, this is about keeping me safe as a Jew, not necessarily as an anything else. it's a bulwark against anti-Jewish violence, not every other -ism under the sun.³ but the thing is, i'm not a potato-head person. you can't just snap off the trans part of me and the Jewish part of me and say the latter part is safe even when the first isn't. i'm 100% Jewish and 100% trans; if i'm not safe as a transsexual, i'm not safe as a Jew. and if i'm going to be having to fight transphobia anyway, what difference does it make if the people passing bills stripping my rights are Jews or not?⁴

if you really lean into the logic at play here — "no one outside a vulnerable demographic can be trusted to care about people in that demographic" — it's easy to wind up in absurdity. because if i can't trust goyim to have my back as a Jew and also can't trust cis people to have my back as a transsexual, perhaps i need a state run by and for Jewish transsexuals. but wait! white Jewish transsexuals are certainly regularly horrible to, eg, Black Jewish transsexuals, so we probably shouldn't be in the same state together, to say nothing of separating out the poor, the disabled, those without college degrees . . . and before you know it, you're committed to the idea that the only just world is one where we're each a state unto ourselves, perfectly safe in absolute isolation from one another — no society, no coming together across difference to lighten the burden of living, just infinite atomization, the perfect unending unwinnable war of all against all

and this, i think, reveals the fundamental futility of the project. as a transsexual, i don't think my safety will ultimately come from removing myself from people not like me. safety, i think, comes not from cutting ties, but from building them. i will only really be safe in a society that accepts difference, multiplicity, strangeness, variety. i will only be truly safe in a society where we come together — across the gulfs that separate us — to take care of one another

i think there are illuminating parallels with feminist/lesbian separatism here. in its most extreme versions, such separatism abandons the demand that women be safe around men and instead attempts the task of building a space without men for women to inhabit. similarly, it seems to me that Jewish ethno-nationalism abandons the demand that Jewish people be safe around goyim and instead attempts to build a space without goyim for Jewish people to inhabit.⁵ i think Jews can and must be safe among goyim. i think women can and must be safe among men. i think trans people can and must be safe among cis people. that is the kind of world i am committed to fighting for, not one where we give in to fear and retreat into gardens walled by suspicion and hostility⁶

i'm not going to pretend that that's an easy world to build.⁷ i'm not going to pretend i can point to a bunch of stable, just, pluralistic societies and go "eh, just do what they did!" (altho there's no shortage of societies i can point to that went the "this place is for us and only us" route and wound up producing dystopian nightmares⁸). i'm not even going to pretend that i think building a just world from where we are now is inevitable, or even that i always think it is possible. there are days it is very hard to believe. but i always think it's worth striving for. if a just world that guarantees a good life to all isn't worth striving for, what is? if we are to suffer defeat, let it be a slow defeat, a long defeat, a fighting defeat. i am not willing to give up on my neighbors. i am not willing to abandon the charge of seeking the good for those not like me. i am not willing to abandon the hope that will seek the good for me despite my strangeness to them. and i reject any philosophy or politics that asks me to do so

_________________________________________________

¹i'm using "Jewish ethno-nationalist" here because i think it's been subject to less semantic dilution than "Zionist", and i want to avoid semantic arguments here as much as possible. whatever prescriptivist arguments you want to marshal that this or that term should mean X, i think it's clear that the descriptivist ship has long since set sail when it comes to "Zionism". (when pushed for specifics, i've seen self-professed Zionists and anti-Zionists outline essentially identical political programs, which certainly makes it seem to me that these terms are of minimal utility at best)

²obviously, what's happening on the ground is very bad. but critiquing what's happening on the ground often runs into severe questions of evidential reliability and can also leave the impression that Jewish ethno-nationalism is a good idea implemented badly, which is why i want to take aim at this level here

³given the European origins of this movement in its modern incarnation, i think it's unsurprising who gets imagined as "just a Jew" and not any other marked category. and from there, i think it's also unsurprising (if depressing) how various Jews who do exist in other marked categories have been and are treated by the "Jewish State" — the promised safety turns out to be predicated on all the usual axes of whiteness, wealth, ability, and so on

⁴indeed, i have often found that groups predicated on the idea that "we're all in alignment here" are often much more resistant to acknowledging members' various bigotries than groups not predicated on that assumption

⁵and, similarly, this attempt to cleave the world along one axis of hierarchy invariably reveals the inadequacy of one-identity-only frameworks for tackling the full complexity of the world. among other things, feminist/lesbian separatism has come under sustained critique from Black feminists like Barbara Smith for sundering ties of solidarity that are critical for fighting racism. victimhood and oppression are not fixed, ontological states, but fluid, shifting, contextual relationships. we cannot undo the snarlingly intertwined systems of oppression by replicating them in miniature

⁶the fear is certainly a real emotion; it is one i have felt at times myself. sometimes it is even based on an accurate perception of the world! but also: sometimes not. my fear of kitchen knives spontaneously levitating and flying around the room certainly feels real to me, but it's not a thing that can actually happen. one of the really hard things to do in the world, i've found, is parsing out the fears that are just feelings i'm having from the fears that tell me actual actionable information about the world and then striking a livable balance between reasonable precaution and paranoia. precautions against danger often come with their own set of risks: locking a door to keep out potential thieves ups the odds of being trapped in a building fire; using a different complex password for every site raises the risk of forgetting one and having a critical account shut down; the medications that drastically cut the frequency of debilitating migraines can raise the likelihood of other adverse health effects. more broadly, viewing neighbors with suspicion, fear, and distrust has a corrosive effect on the social fabric, and makes it harder to structure society to make sure everyone has food, clothes, housing, healthcare — all the things a society is supposed to do. (it's hard to convince people to take care of people they're afraid of, especially if they believe (rightly or wrongly) that they will have to give up something they care about (usually money, but also convenience, prestige, power) for that to happen.) and that corrosive effect can get very extreme — when fascism wants to recruit you to its cause, the sales pitch is usually less "hey, do you want to unleash horrific violence against those folks over there?" and more "hey, aren't you tired of being ~afraid~? don't you want to feel ~safe~? isn't it about time you had all the wealth, respect, and power that's rightfully yours and that's been kept from you for so long?". fear isn't the only way that horrors get unleashed, but it's a very potent one. (i don't think there's a formula for striking the right balance here. as with so many balancing acts, too much comes down to context and the specifics of all those involved, not least because the scale and nature of threats can vary so wildly. i believe that everyone deserves to be safe (insofar as any of us mostly hairless apes clinging to a thin crust of dirt on an iron ball whirling thru the cosmic void around a sphere of nuclear fire can be safe from loss, grief, accident, disaster, or misfortune...), but being and feeling are different matters, and pursuing the feeling of safety without limit can easily lead to logics of annihilation.) (and indeed, i am not the first to be struck by the fact that in many ways it is in the interests of the State of Israel, as a state, if Jews feel unsafe in the rest of the world, because that feeling of unsafety is so easily leveraged to both increase political support for the State of Israel and encourage Jewish people to leave the Diaspora and move to the State of Israel. which, unnervingly, is where you sometimes find the State of Israel and its agents taking the position that Jews don't belong anywhere that isn't the immediate environs of Jerusalem, a position that is ultimately indistinguishable from any number of dime-store Judeophobias)

⁷indeed, i think this is one of many places where it's easier to identify the problem than it is to solve it. many middle schoolers can explain the problem of Fermat's Last Theorem; barely a handful of professional mathematicians in the world could explain the proof. my cat can figure out how to break a vase even tho he can't reliably find a toy he's just been playing with when he's sitting directly on top of it (it's fine, he doesn't follow me on here, i can say that about him); in some cases, a skilled artisan can repair the vase so it functions again; no one in the world can turn back time so that the vase was never broken to begin with. it's easy to invent chessboard solutions to entrenched societal conflicts — move this border here, enact this constitution there, change this societal attitude for all involved, and hey presto!, utopia. but the world is not a game of chess. education, advocacy, activism, political organization, even wildcat direct action — these are all slow, effortful, uncertain processes, and everyone with a different vision of the future is also exercising their agency to change the course of events. i think societies are easy to break and hard to repair. in many cases, i don't really know how we go from here, the real world as it actually is with all its shattered bones and aching wounds and long-festering resentments, to there, a world of true justice. but i think it's worth trying. i think it's worth imagining. i hope you do too

⁸like, idk what even to say if "Germany for the Germans" doesn't set off alarm bells. even if they raised up a brand new continent from the ocean floor, i still think i'd be wary of the political project of building a ~Jewish state for the Jews~. i don't trust nationalism of any flavor. i think the Diasporic notion of feeling kinship with and responsibility for people all around the world regardless of borders, flags, kings, bureaucracies is beautiful and worth cherishing and protecting. i don't dream of finally being on top of the hierarchy; i dream of there not being a hierarchy to begin with

[undrthelights]

a study really needs to be done on why almost every one direction fan ended up gay

[muckyschmuck]

more shitpost instead of actually comicing

[trashcanwithsprinkles]

I feel like the wildest thing is like. Again, the creation of Nahida way earlier in the timeline. A proof of concept, as you would. A tiny god child and Ajax is just well. She might stay tiny for centuries or she might grow better outside of being imprisoned- and isn’t that a wild thing to just drop on someone. This tiny god of dreams

it would be absolutely buckwild but also conisder: dream divination becomes a thing

[dylanlila]

I think a lot of it (being drawn to people who remind us of other people) has to do with our human tendency for pattern recognition. For better or worse, we like to notice patterns and group things accordingly, and this ABSOLUTELY plays out in how we choose which people to spend time with! There's a sense of comfort that comes with familiarity. "Ah, I already know how to interact with this type of human." I think THIS is mostly the explanation for the very real phenomenon of people choosing partners that resemble their parents in some way (there was no need to get as weird with it as Freud did, haha). You feel like you already know what to expect! They feel like "home" in that way, but whether that is good or bad largely depends on what the prior relationship WAS. Sometimes a familiar Badness can FEEL safer than the Unknown. But anyway, we also recognize those patterns with other relationships! "I made friends with this person because they remind me of ME," or "I was attracted to this person because they remind me of this other person whom I love, and I already know that I get along with this Type of person." There's a lot said about the allure of the "new" and the whole "opposites attract" thing, which of course CAN come into play as well, but I think there's also a lot to be said about getting to know a person and sensing: "Oh. I know YOU." (The same way we know which berries are the ones safe to eat. 😂 We observe and categorize. All the time!)

This is a topic I have been fighting about with my mother for YEARS now (I literally nicknamed her Freud) and we only recently came to a sort of compromise when it comes to it and yes. Okay. I am willing to accept that my mother acts like my father's mother, my grandmother, or that my father resembles my own mother's father in certain regards, but I came up with my own romanticized view on it that works in certain cases. Sure, there must be something animalistic about it and for some it's definitely this cyclic occurrence involving generations and generations of people, but in my particular case my mother and father both managed to outgrow the circumstances of their childhoods, both financially and psychologically. (our family is nothing like the families they grew up in and I wish everyone could grow up the way I did) But I choose to believe this urge to find others similar to us or our loved ones in thought specifically can be a form of breaking the cycle. I love the way your mind works because mine or a loved ones works similarly so by "assembling" these people based on this instinct we are capable of building our own families, not entirely independent from genetics or history, but even better precisely because it is based on these things we cannot chose, but still manage to outsmart in some way. Sure. I pick you because you are familiar in some way, but what if we were dealt the same cards others before us were dealt and we did something different with them this time. Even if it's a slight change, it's still a fresh addition to the genetics of our lives because it's only a form of mutation that is capable of changing things for the better.