I’ve seen this new trend of girls posting videos like “I hate my boyfriend for bringing all of his stupid boy things into our apartment when we moved in together 🙄” and then pictures of his hot wheels collection or a Halloween skeleton or an extremely cool pirate flag. Give him to me you do not deserve him.

Buckle up, folks. I’ve got a lot to say on this…

I’m not one of those guys who subscribes to the “Man Cave” idea. That theory that once you’re in a relationship, you’re required to forfeit 99% of your own home and be grateful to have one room in which you can be yourself and have your own possessions on display. I think if you’re in a relationship, you have a right to make your home reflect your personality and interests as much your partner does. I’ve run into a couple of instances where a woman thinking a man has no right to his own possessions has not gone over so well and it was hysterical.

I once knew a guy who worked in the telemarketing department of a company I worked at. One Friday night after work, he told me about how he ended up breaking up with his girlfriend.

This guy was like me, very clean and orderly and liked things a certain way but he wasn’t volatile about it or anything. He and his girlfriend decide to have a weekend sleepover at his house, a trial run in his mind for moving in together. She showed up and the red flags sprang up immediately. “Where’s your bag?” he asks. “For a weekend? I don’t need one.” she says. His mind reels. “So you’re not gonna change clothes…or shower…or brush your teeth…?” “No. Why would I do that in just a couple of days?” He tries to be okay about it but then she starts “cooking” and the kitchen looks like a war zone. Then there’s the fact that her B.O. seems to get stronger by the hour.

The last straw comes towards the end of the weekend when she walks around his place, eyes his Elvis Presley memorabilia collection and says “If I lived here, all this Elvis shit would get set out for trash, I’m not wasting space on all that.” When it finally comes time for her to go back home, she says “This was fun! Can’t wait to do it again.” “Yeah, about that…” and he dumped her in his own driveway.

He said if he had to choose between hygiene and an Elvis collection he’s built for years and her, he’s gonna be happier being single, cleaner and having his collectibles around than he would be with her.

Another instance happened when I had a garage sale and one of the things I was selling was a talking football player action figure from the 90s that someone had bought me under the presumption that because I was boy, I was into sports (I was not). The action figure was brand new in the box because that was how little I cared about playing with it despite my mother’s best attempts. A woman shows up, sees the action figure and loses her shit.

“Oh God, I am so sick of seeing these! My husband has the whole set and all I want to do is throw them in the trash!” A guy at the sale overhears this and says “Well, I’m sure your husband has a list of things that he’d like to get rid of that you’re partial to but he doesn’t say anything because that’s the give and take of being in a relationship” She blows him off and says “I should be the one to decide what goes in the house and what he can buy, THAT is how marriage works for ME.” The guy changes his argument. “Maybe on your husband’s list of shit that needs to go, you should be at the top of the list…” Everyone else at the garage sale (including me) was now watching silently and wondering when the throw down would happen…

“What did you say?”, she asks him a bit taken back. “I said if I was him, I wouldn’t take that shit that somehow being married to you means forfeiture of my belongings and personality and substituting it all for your bullshit. I’d sooner throw you out than my action figures.” After picking her jaw up off my driveway, the woman hurumphs and storms back to her car. I high-five the guy for making an excellent point after she leaves.

I have a lot of collectibles myself and am currently in the creative habit of going through my childhood Power Rangers and Pokémon toys and putting the ones I absolutely want to keep in shadow boxes and hanging them on the wall as conversation pieces and selling the rest.

I have Funko Pops. I have lunchboxes. I have special edition magazines and comic books in floater frames on the wall. I have more books than I have time to count or read. I have tub after tub of Halloween and Christmas decorations because that’s my favorite time of year. I would never throw all of this stuff away because I’ve purged plenty already and kept what I wanted to keep. It’s all a reflection of my personality and my story. If someone came into my life and said our life together would mean giving all of this up and doing what he wanted, I would consider that a toxic situation and I would end it before I got in too deep.

Men, gay or straight, can find themselves in toxic, abusive relationships, this is not a phenomenon only experienced by women. It just seems that way because men, especially straight men, rarely speak up about it and mistakenly settle on what they assume is some unchangable default result of being in a relationship. It’s not.

I would never move in with someone and tell them to throw everything out that has been a part of them or spoken to who they are in order to make room for me. I am all about organizing and making a space feel cozy, functional and fun and would go out of my way to make sure we both had space for our things and our personalities and stories. One does not have to overshadow or overpower the other in order to make a relationship between two people work.

So, the next time someone says “It’s me or the Star Wars action figures on that one shelf that aren’t bothering anyone but I hate that that shelf isn’t all about me anyway” say “May The Force not hit you in the ass on the way out” as you show them the door.

My dad broke up with the girlfriend he had when he was 20ish because she said "the motorcycle goes or I go". And not because she genuinely didn't like motorcycles, no! Because a friend of hers told her bf to get rid of the bike or lose her, and that guy choose the girl. Dad's ex saw it as a power play she could pull on my dad as well. He turned her out on the spot.

I used to think guys just didn’t have any interests?? Or hobbies?? Because of all those images of homes where the wife designs everything and there’s basically no touch of the husband there anywhere, and how it was implied that that’s “normal”.

I just reblogged this but then I thought and I just have to make this addition?

Yeah, that last comment, that's how fucked up our society has gotten, because men have to conceal or hide or at best get ONE room to put their stuff in, and even then it's treated as terrible and regressive and should not be allowed. The 'Man Cave' aka the one space in a person's house where they're allowed to express themselves and their hobbies and it's treated as a terrible thing because he's 'excluding' his wife from it, while the things that are in there are NOT ALLOWED ANYWHERE ELSE.

We have allowed people to brainwash us into two dumb ideas, one that men are expected to give up everything that they love for their significant others, and the second that it's a burden on women that they have to determine how everything is in the household. Because that is also how it is in so many cases.

Felt this meme would be important here.

The meme is perfect here and this thread as a whole makes me realise how screwed up society is and also how happy I am to not be living in such a household

Worcester, Mass

Official Post of Massachusetts

-person who forgot to take their not-feeling-terrible medication

So this post is the single reason I took my meds today. Reblogging out of duty.

The Pokemon regions

Pokemon Heritage Post

leitmotifs never get old to me like holy shit dude there’s this melody that corresponds to this one guy and if you hear the melody it means the guy is there. holy shit. and sometimes it refers to ideas too not just guys. has anyone heard about this

Sometimes something fucked up happens to the guy and their melody gets fucked up too. Sometimes the thing that fucked them up also has its own melody and when the first melody gets fucked up the second melody gets mixed in

no fucking way dude. are you serious

This machine kills AI

This is the most satisfying story I've read in a long time

i need a polycule of tall skinny white guys preferably like around 10 of them so i can dress them up in nice outfits and give them cute little red ribbon chokers. (hiding a bowling ball behind my back) For no real reason

the way sesame street, a pbs puppet show for literal babies, is pressing on with pride content despite vitriolic monsters descending on every post to insinuate they're pedophiles or demons while some of the biggest companies on the planet who could swim in olympic swimming pools of money like scrooge mcduck on steroids buckle and cave just emphasizes how completely and utterly pathetic these corporations are. they'd butcher a baby if it meant saving a penny.

where Starbucks and Target and Budweiser will be bullied into submission with the slightest push, puppets and people in your neighborhood stand tall

Sesame Workshop has been doing pride stuff since 2017. The Muppet Wiki has a nice list of stuff they've done:

Jim Henson supported his openly queer colleagues in the 1970s! The Muppet performer Richard Hunt was majorly influential on Sesame Street, the Muppet Show, and Fraggle Rock.

They also dumped Chick-fil-A in 2012 when CFA made their stance on gay marriage known.

It would be a dishonor to their memories for the Jim Henson Company to kowtow to queerphobic demands when their namesake always stood for diversity and acceptance of everyone, and it makes me proud to be a Muppet fan to see that insisted upon 💖🌈

i hated being 15 and wanted to die too, or at least have something change. now that i can look back, i can identify what, specifically, gets "better:"

-at 15 you have almost no control over your schedule, including sleep. the school system demands a sleep/wake cycle that's extremely unnatural and difficult to keep even for normal teenagers, and amounts to constant sleep deprivation (a form of torture) for nightowl teenagers. constant sleep deprivation or even just chronic disregulation fucks with your entire body, your hormones, and your mental health. it makes everything worse.

-as an adult, a lot of jobs do expect you to be a morning person, but at least your body is more likely to cooperate with a 9-5 work/sleep schedule, and you're also more free to take second shift or night shift work that suits you. as an adult you need less sleep than teenagers and have fewer authority figures in your life to get in the way of when and how much you nap.

-at 15 if you attend any school other than homeschooling, you're basically in jail that's also hell. everyone is a similar age to you and going through similar, or worse, problems, and they're going to take it out on everyone around them. you have very little ability to get away from bullies, and you're just fucked when your bullies are your teachers, your parents, your parents' friends. if you're attending homeschooling, you trade an inescapably crowded and stressful social situation for an inescapably isolated social situation, one where your parents have absolute authority over every part of your life. a solitary prison is even worse than crowded one.

-as an adult, a dysfunctional and abusive workplace has a huge impact on your mental and physical health, and many people do die or kill themselves because of a degrading and terrible job. however, as an adult, you're likely to have more power to chose your workplace, it's likely to be a shorter and less rigorous day than highschool+homework, and you get paid for it. plus, a good job is extremely empowering and satisfying.

-at 15 your body is growing and you need large, regular, balanced meals. lots of 15 year olds skip breakfast and have shitty lunches, because school is terrible. lots of 15 year olds have food insecurity or are on diets, either chosen or imposed, and this makes them depressed and emotionally volatile. at 15, you probably don't have very much positive control over your meals, since your parents are in charge of groceries and meal prep. just negative control, by skipping or refusing. replacing meals with soda or candy is also a problem-- your body craves a big hit of sugar at all times, because you're growing, but replacing meals and sleep with soda just leads to more disregulation. teens can easily get into really dysfunctional cycles this way.

-as an adult you have more time to eat and more control over what you eat. you have your own salary and make your own shopping lists. as an adult you're also not going through growth spurts anymore: your body grows and maintains itself through its whole life, but it's steadier. you work out what you like and you know how to get it.

IN CONCLUSION: at 15 you're depressed for a lot of good reasons. if someone has a grueling and unrewarding schedule that traps them with other miserable people all day, subject to hostile authority figures with no escape, and they're expected to do lots of work with few rewards and frequent punishment, they're going to be miserable. this is further compounded when a person has a rapidly growing body that can't possibly get a healthy amount of nourishment and rest. these are the conditions that reliably cause depression.

as an adult, we're telling you "it gets better" because in about four years you will be free of so much of what's making you miserable right now. to eat food you like, to rest as much as you need, to work a paying job or chase your own dreams, to decide what kind of life you want to live. it might not sound like much, but it's everything.

It's not just to have a "do over" that doesn't involve the original cast, it's to cut them out of the royalties. Literally the entire point is to make sure all the money made by Harry Potter goes to transphobes or people willing to work with transphobes.

If you watch it, you are supporting bigotry, hate, and oppression. That's just objective reality. All for a story that you probably have already seen in movie and book form.

#the last point is especially true since the old cast receives royalties for anything with their likeness on it#meaning the original trio still gets money for every mug with their 14 year old faces on it#if they stop making those and replace them with the new cast which they will the old cast gets cut off completely#which is again exactly what rowling wants because she cannot stand those 'ungrateful brats' as she would likely put it#and as she has last say in anything that gets made in harry potter paraphernalia this might also explain the decrease in faces on products

via @discipleofkleio

I hate Rowling so much.

Mouse Armor by Jeff De Boer

I love his stated intention behind these projects, ‘Confuse historians’.

Every friend group of highly educated literary snobs (affectionate) needs at least one person who, when the situation calls for it, can go “nope, now you’re just putting a pseudointellectual veneer over something that’s essentially bullshit”

People for the past 5 years: "If covid effected our immune systems, we'd be seeing other diseases become more common"

2025: (Measles, TB, Flu, etc. on the rise or sticking around longer than normal)

People from the past 5 years: "What is going on?"

The cast of the Original Trilogy had cliched, boring character concepts that were executed wonderfully enough for it not to matter. 

 The cast of the Prequel Trilogy had interesting concepts that were executed poorly enough to make them seem utterly stupid. 

The cast of the Sequel Trilogy had amazing, thought-provoking concepts that were executed in the town square and put up on pikes as a warning to others.

This is actually probably the best summary of star wars I’ve ever seen

You know that post that was going around like a year ago. That said something like 'hey you don't need to wear any makeup' and people kept commenting shit like 'yeah just a little eyeliner is enough'. This is how this post feels to me

The way I see it, it's a tool, like anything else. But you need to understand what are appropriate and inappropriate uses of the tool.

Using it to as an executive function assistant to help plan grocery lists and dinners? Totally fine (functionally, even if not ethically, but that's a separate question). It can do that. Helping you make or organize a to-do list? Also fine.

Using it as a search engine, though? If, like that person, you're genuinely only using it to help you find actual sources, okay. But I find that a lot of people, including people who I would have thought are too intelligent for this, to use it to actually answer their questions the way a search engine would.

This is not an appropriate use of the tool, because it could be feeding you incorrect data and you would not know.

If you ask chatGPT to plan a meal based on the items in your fridge, and it makes a mistake and tells you to make a grilled cheese sandwich with tomatoes even though you didn't put tomatoes on the list of ingredients, no harm is done. Simply omit the tomatoes.

On the other hand, if you ask chatGPT a question about something factual (like history or politics, but even something less "important" like the plot of a movie), and it makes a mistake by giving you a paragraph of 95% accurate information with 5% made-up information mixed in, but all presented reasonably and clearly like a Wikipedia article, you will not know about the mistakes and are most likely going to believe that 5%. On a large scale, this wrecks our communal knowledge base and makes us less knowledgeable, more confused, and more wrong.

I think it is worth honing your search engine and online research skills, rather than using chatGPT as a crutch. And, I know our English teachers told us not to use Wikipedia as a source, but reading Wikipedia for info is miles better than using chatGPT, because at least the people writing the info are human and need to cite their sources, and they're being checked by other humans. Rather than a neural network spitting out information that it doesn't even "know" is accurate because it can't "know" anything; all it can do is mimic the way humans write without the ability to parse or understand it. When in doubt, use Wikipedia.

An AI could exist, at least in the future, that can parse and check things, but that is not what chatGPT is. It is not a robotic mind. What it does is it aggregates content, and figures out what a human might say in response to a question.

For example, if you train a generative AI (like chatGPT) only on logs of conversations between flat earthers, if you ask that generative AI if the earth is flat, it will say that it is. When it does give accurate answers, that's only because enough of its training data had accurate info. But it does not have any internal checks to verify anything that it's saying to you. Its job is merely to predict what it thinks is the most likely response to your question. That is to say, I think some people believe that it is a robot running a search on a search engine, parsing the results, and then giving an answer. That is not what is happening.

But again, if I use it as an executive function assistant to make my shopping list and it gets the shopping list wrong, that is not actually an issue. What is an issue is if I ask it about facts and it gives me incorrect facts.

Wikipedia also has some serious reliability issues right now, specifically regarding politically contentious topics. Don't automatically trust it; check its references and confirm with other sources.

But yeah, don't *ever* use chatGPT (or any other generative AI) for anything where facts matter. They are basically just fancy autocomplete algorithms and are completely incapable of fact-checking. They make shit up *all the time*.