A friend has once again brought it to my attention that it is unusual to have an intact chronological memory of life prior to age 12 and you know what’s weird to ME is that the rest of yall forgot how to sing the clean-up song

Other shit:

Yes I’ve talked about this before and yes I’m going to talk about it again because every single person on earth should be fully and viscerally aware that being a kid feels like every description I’ve ever read of recovering from a stroke and we all grow up and forget and talk about childhood like it was magic.

Yeah some of it was fun and all but don’t you remember FALLING DOWN CONSTANTLY? You don’t remember needing help putting a shirt on cause you got your arm stuck and couldn’t get out and panicked so bad you started crying? You DON’T remember being just CONSTANTLY STICKY? Ohhh my good, pissing yourself. Pissing yourself was the worst. Christ alive, and being put in the playpen with a weird kid

Why were you falling into the toilet?

I WAS LIKE TWO FEET TALL

what's weird about my brain is that i have extremely bad *voluntary* recall but if someone else can prompt me, it turns out that more often than not, the memories are still on file

i would like to also add:

-being a nervous kid means living in silent hill permanently forever. there are monsters. they WILL get you. you can't predict when. no one thinks this is noteworthy.

-some foods make you sick. somehow this doesn't mean you can just not eat them. being sick is really inconsiderate of you, too.

-sticky crumbs are the worst.

-kids cooler than you hate you. kids weirder than you are even more unpredictably violent.

-no one understands your creative vision. 'house' would be so much better with a dragon. why does this require extensive debate.

-the assholes who never put the play dough caps back on the tubs should get their hands unscrewed.

-that one girl who can't tell a story but cries if you interrupt whatever boring thing she was failing to say

-boys are allowed to kill any creature they want in front of you specifically to hurt your feelings and you're the bad guy when you bite them???

-rose petals should taste good but don't. WHY.

-that one church lady who thinks screaming in a shrill and pathetic way at the rude boys is going to work THIS time. what the fuck is wrong with her

-snail slime washes off but slug slime is forever. i still don't understand this one.

-if there are millions of grownups in the world why can't they replace the one currently fucking up being in charge of you and the six boys who like to to torture you. like there's lots more teachers. can't you get one who is trained in not letting kids get tortured? no one in the room has been sneaky about the torture thing. come on.

-clay soil should taste good. look at it. deeply unfair that it doesn't.

-you will never regret putting a small smooth rock in your mouth.

-you chewed too much string and are having an unprecedented bathroom situation.

-why does your friend's mom smell so bad? bad-smelling moms seems like it should be against the rules.

-why does your other friend's mom smell so good? can you get your mom to smell like this?

-extremely specific pretend game scenarios you revisit over and over until your friends are exasperated and ten years later you go OH SHIT as you understand some very embarrassing things about yourself.

-rolling down a grassy hill was such a fantastic combination of chaos and freedom and safety. it's still fun as a grownup but my joints don't agree.

-the utter devastation of squishing a bug you were trying to save. you go from disney princess to warcrimes mcbloodhands in one irreversible second.

-sometimes the free lollipop is just kinda mid. and they don't give you another one to make up for it. and you can't even get THAT mad because mid is still better than nothing.

-mom tells you to clean your toys up but you only have one basket for your stuffed animals, who are currently having a civil war. not good.

-being small enough to climb into a box full of packing peanuts. incredibly good noise. incredibly good texture.

-do you also remember unspooling a tape measure allll the way out, confirming to everyone that the metal end bit COULD rip your eye out, then dropping the tape measure and running out of range before the tape respooled?

-pissing your pants sucks so bad. it stings. and it seems to take so much longer to dry than a water spill does

-you're still a person, every year of your life. everyone says you'll be different when you grow up. and every grownup is so strange, so distant, so unsympathetic and illogical and dismissive and alien. you wonder what could ever make you that different. you wonder why no one can explain.

The “extremely specific pretend game scenarios” turned out to be an early sign that one of my BFFs was a lesbian, but since I myself am straight, I didn’t understand why she was so much more into Princess Leia than I was (my bae was Han Solo) until much later. 😂

If I may:

The thing I remember the most is being told I was 'dramatic' about things that would later be classified as Symptoms of Disorders and Diseases that I had my whole life, and some of them were things that the adults in my life knew that I had. Yes, the sun really does hurt my eyes so bad I want to throw up, actually. Yes, it really did take 4 months for the tendons in my foot to heal and no I was not just trying to get out class early. Yes, it really does make me feel very sick when I am forced to eat things with aspartame in it.

I'm just really stuck here on the original post saying it's unusual to have chronological memories before AGE 12???

Like, sure, I don't have a lot of memories of being 2-3, but I do have several that I do know for certain happened then from context clues.

(Things where my sister hadn't been born yet, which happened when I was 2 1/2, being upset after my sister came home from the hospital and wanting my mom to pay attention to me, my uncle was a huge bag of dicks about the fact I couldn't say my TH sounds and made fun of me for saying "I'm free" instead of "I'm three", being in my booster seat in the car, etc).

But TWELVE? That can't possibly be right. I know some people don't have strong memories before age 6-7, but 12 seems bizarre.

I have a TON of memories of being 4-6, and even more later on.

Usually in stories where the lead character gets a whole harem of lovelorn admirers, it begs a lot of willing suspension of disbelief. Especially when the harem protagonist is also trying to be a relatable audience proxy, because as most average people can verify, getting people to fall in love with you at the drop of a hat is not a normal thing. Many a harem anime has tried to work around this by asserting that the lead is just somehow attracting absolute weirdos by the dozens, and coincidentally this flavor of freak just really goes for the "boring and generically nice-ish" type, but plenty also just shrug and are like, yeah everyone's in love with this guy for no discernible reason, just go with it.

But then there's Scum Villain. With Shen Yuan, I can finally buy this happening. At last someone got the "audience proxy character" formula to combine successfully with the "most desirable love interest" formula.

#svsss#shen yuan#shen qingqiu#scum villain#scum villain's self saving system#of course I think part of how this was achieved was a total lack of conflation with 'audience proxy' and 'aggressively normal person'#in fact sy is 'aggressively normal' only in the sense that trying to repress or downplay his queerness is a major preoccupation of his#anyway#would (X)

It's also about who's defining the norms/whose normal we're talking about:

Cucumber-bro is normal in the sense that he's from our world, which - in a world where most people aren't - makes him seem normal.

He's also normal in the sense that SVSSS is a webnovel about webnovels and therefore the norm of its readers is to be terminally online freaks who obsess over fiction and have blorbos. in this context, Cucumber-bro is perfectly normal. MXTX made her audience proxy normal for the sort of people her audience is.

Shen Yuan goes to a lot of effort to convincing you that he is a normal man acting in rational ways to extraordinary circumstances, and that his bizarreness is just a natural consequence of being a fish-out-of-water as he is

and then you meet the other transmigrator, Shang Qinghua, who is Not Like That at all, and you realize oh yeah. Shen Qingqiu is just weird

to be fair, Airplane is also completely abnormal. it's really the entire concept of "a normal guy" that's getting taken out back and shot

𝐈 𝐖𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐃𝐢𝐞 𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐘𝐨𝐮

I know a bunch of people are into this as a kink thing, but as a person who is really into survivalism, this is so cool.

Strap them on like backpack

writers take note if you have a scene where a character needs to move someone

when people pop off with some ass take like "why should I have to put my pronouns in my profile or signature or whatever, my name is Tom and I have short hair and am wearing an oxford shirt in my profile pic, figure it out" I always think

so do you just not talk to people from other countries for your job, ever?

like, some people don't, and you can follow the flowchart to a different part of the argument about why pushing back about pronouns is stupid, but I e-mail people in Singapore and Dubai and Japan and India every day. A lot of those people have names that are probably their local equivalent of "Tom," but I have never seen them before and I have no idea if that's a girl's name or a boy's name. They usually have profile pics too. I don't know how common short hair is for women or long hair is for men in their country. I don't know if that style of shirt is more common for men or more common for women. I'm not writing this from some homogenous whitebread oasis, either, I live in New York City, it's just simply not possible for me to know the common names in every language of every country where the people I need to work with, live.

just put your stupid pronouns in your signature, some exasperated project manager in Mumbai will one day appreciate it

I'm always teeth grit rolling the fucking dice on some Tsumugi on the Tokyo team rocking a pixie cut and a blue shirt, help me

you are that Tsumugi to somebody

I had an older, white, male coworker ask me over message:

"Hi, the Team Lead for our sister team... I need to ask them a favour. I've never met them in person, and their name is Chinese. Are they a man or a woman?"

And I was like "<Name's> pronouns are she/her"

This guy had never seen pronouns used in the wild before. He honestly thought they only mattered to people who flew the rainbow flag in their office. The look of dawning comprehension in his eyes warmed my heart for a solid week.

1$ flea market score. Tiny glass 1960s perfume bottles. I love them.

Can you swap their heads ?

omg you can

Their meeting was foretold in the ancient texts

My pareidolia is so strong I immediately saw a tall figure in a blue and white robe or gown BEFORE I scrolled to see that OP also had and drew it. Or are we not outliers and everybody else sees it.

At first glance I thought it was a sculpture. At second glance I thought it was a sculpture in a really weird place. I scrolled down and wondered why someone had drawn the sculpture of a figure as a figure, then I scrolled back up and realized 'debris'.

Reblog if you've found friendship because of your fandoms.

Had a dream last night that i was a knight and this bigger scarier knight had me on the ground and right before he swung his sword at my neck he said smth like "i mourn the loss of life for the tree who will become your coffin" which shouldnt have turned me on like it did but alas

@theshitpostcalligrapher I think I found one for you.

sweeeeeeet

ink: diamine oxblood

you have more degrees of freedom than you think

you can completely reinvent yourself in well under a year with sufficient commitment

you probably make at least one decision every day which will meaningfully alter the path you’re on if you change it

this is terrifying but it’s also maybe the best thing about being alive

as long as you’re breathing, there’s a chance

arrested for impersonating grains of rice (NO possibility of parole)

Yall the point is that sex toys need to be in a sex store not a pharmacy. Also five year olds these days can in fact read, three year olds these days can read I work in a daycare I have seen it. And why would there be a sex toy AISLE in a PHARMACY in a DRUG STORE?? I’m so??? Sex toys don’t belong in drug stores.

I grew up in pennsylvania, which has pretty stringent liquor laws, so it was absolutely wild to me the first time I walked into a grocery store in california and they had ALCOHOL. RIGHT THERE. NEXT TO THE FOOD. I was shooketh, may I tell you! Alcohol belongs in The Alcohol Store! Why would you treat it as something you can just... purchase! With money and an ID! RIGHT THERE IN PUBLIC! How was anyone not worried that kids might... reach out and TOUCH a bottle!!

I got over it.

Anyway drugstores (in the US) also dispense birth control medications and viagra, sell tampons, antifungals, condoms, and all manner of hygiene products incl. douching kits. Makes perfect sense to me that they'd also sell sex toys. They've got everything else you'd put on your junk.

Eh, five year olds can read, but they're unlikely to be squirrelly about things unless the grown-up in question models squirrelly-ness.

Like, if I had been out shopping seven years ago, it would have gone like this.

Kiddo: For . . . her . . . peas . . . Me: It says "for her pleasure" but that's just for adults. Kiddo: Can I have a lollipop? Can we both have lollipops? I'm bored. Me: We will pick up the lollipops on our way out at the checkout. Can you tell Mama what's next on the list? Kiddo: . . . Cog soup? Me: Good guess! Cough syrup. And no, I don't know why gh says f in this particular case, letters do weird things. Let's go.

… cog soup.

#pharmacies are selling sex toys because they sell sexual health items#the fact that they don't have to be coy about it is a good thing as it denotes a huge advancement in our collective social maturity#which i am not about to have taken away by people who can't be bothered to explain things to their children#did you pop them out expecting to never have to think through what you're saying to them?#skill issue

The way the toys are blurred out as if they need to have their identities protected 😆. Ah, America, you really are insane about sex.

It's all the cog soup we eat. It clogs the brain with too many cogs.

As someone with young children, explaining the sex toys and condoms in the pharmacy section at walmart is much, much easier than explaining why the formula is locked away. My daughter thought that it was dangerous, like medicine.

Having to explain to her that some people have to steal in order to feed their babies carved out a piece of my soul and burned it.

real question,

why do proshippers love rape so much? do you guys want to rape someone irl?

why do you guys love pedophilia/grooming so much? have you ever had thoughts about doing those actions or irl minors?

why do you guys love incest so much? is this just a way for you to vent your frustration cause your sibling(s) /step sibling(s) rejected you for your literal illegal behavior?

why do you guys love all these crimes so much? why do you love it when someone calls sexual and predatory abuse attractive as if it hasn't traumatized billions of people word wide?

this is like a genuine question I'm being deadass

Proshippers do not "love" these things. Rather, we're committed to defending the right of people to write about them - even in ways we might personally find disgusting or upsetting - because we understand that engaging with something in fiction is not predicated on defending or desiring it in real life. Even if someone is aroused by something in fiction, it doesn't logically follow that they're aroused by the same thing in real life, because context - the question of how, when, why and with whom - is foundational to both desire and consent. Meaning: it is possible - and, indeed, extremely normal - to enjoy something only as a fantasy: to be compelled, aroused by or interested in it only because it's fictional, in much the same way that we might be compelled, aroused by or interested in all manner of ideas or activities only under specific conditions.

For instance: I enjoy cake! But if someone handed me a piece of filthy, rotting cake they found on the floor, I would not want to eat it, because the context of the cake matters to my willingness to consume it. Similarly, I enjoy murder mysteries! But if someone in my life was brutally killed by an unknown assailant, I would be devastated, not entertained. And this latter example is particularly important, because our consumption of fiction is at all times informed by our awareness of the fact that the characters don't exist. No matter what befalls them on page, stage or screen, no real person has been harmed, which allows us to react to the content differently than if we were seeing the same events unfold in person, or in a live recording.

Now: it's true that, just as fiction is influenced by reality, so too can reality be influenced by fiction, both on the individual level and at scale. Fictional characters might not exist, but their stories still meaningfully impact real human beings, both positively and negatively. But this impact doesn't work on anything even vaguely resembling a universal, one-to-one basis, such that X story is guaranteed to cause Y effect, or that X topic is only ever explored for Y reason - and this is just as true for dark, unsettling and taboo topics as for anything else.

Which is why it's important to understand that, particularly when it comes to sex and desire, human beings are complex. At the most basic level of arousal, our bodies and brains are frequently in conflict. From teenagers dealing with unwanted erections to seniors mourning their loss of libido, none of us has perfect control over when and how we get turned on - and this extends to situations involving rape and assault. It is common, for instance, for rape victims to experience some level of arousal in response to their assault, because our bodies and minds do not exist in a state of perfect sync. Many victims experience deep shame as a result of this, thinking that, because they got hard or wet or came, they must've secretly wanted it - a trauma that's intensified if their assailant makes the same claim. Victims, too, can have complex relationships to their assailants, particularly if they were abused by family members or as children; can sometimes take years or decades to understand that they were harmed at all.

Regardless of whether we've been victimised ourselves, are proximal to someone else's trauma or are simply impacted by living in a world where such things can happen, fiction is the safest possible way to explore these ideas. But precisely because people are so different - precisely because our reactions to the same event or idea can vary so wildly - these stories will not always look the same. What disgusts or triggers one person might be healing to another, and that's not determined by how eroticized the content is or isn't. Sexual trauma responses can encompass opposite extremes: where one rape victim might be utterly repulsed by rape content and need to avoid it for their healing, another victim will feel compelled to seek or create it in order to achieve the same ends, and neither of them is wrong.

I have, for instance, known victims to write their own assaults into fiction. Sometimes these accounts are eroticized as a way of regaining control over a situation in which they had none. Perhaps the writer wants to accurately depict the confusion they felt at being aroused while being assaulted; or, conversely, perhaps their lack of arousal at the time increased the level of physical pain they experienced, and they want to write something which shows that, even if they had been aroused, it would still have been rape. Or on yet a third hand, perhaps they weren't sure if a given experience was rape or not, and want to try and make sense of it. Perhaps they want to try and imagine their assailant's perspective, to better comprehend what happened to them and why. This might mean a complicated, nuanced depiction that sways between awareness of the crime and minimization of it; it might also involve painting them as a flat-out villain, or as someone who believed they were acting only out of love. All of these things are possible! But no matter how much some or all of these portrayals might disgust you, the casual reader, you will not be able to tell, just by looking, who has "really" been assaulted, and who is exploring these topics for other reasons.

Because of course, not all people who write about abuse have experienced it themselves; nor should this be a requirement. Sometimes, we write about dark things, not to achieve catharsis in relation to a personal experience, but to conquer our fear of it happening to us, or perhaps even just to get an adrenaline rush - as is, for instance, extremely common with fans of horror content. Our brains produce a variety of fun chemicals in response to various stimuli, and we don't generally get to choose which ones we find the most engaging. Some people are horror junkies from childhood, seeking out scary stories from the moment they're old enough to ask for them, while others remain terrified of something as mild as cartoon comedy horror well into old age. There's no morality associated with this; it just is - and that all comes back, once again, to the fact that we understand fiction as a separate thing to reality. No matter how horrific the thing depicted, our enjoyment (of whatever kind) is predicated on knowing that no actual human beings being harmed, even if the bad in the story - an axe murder, a war, a rape - is something that really does happen. And returning again to matters of sex, regardless of whether they rise to the level of a kink or fetish, all sexual proclivities are ultimately products of native inclination, life experience, trauma, and/or the overlap of all three, while a specific fantasy might be either literal, metaphoric or a mix of both. A literal fantasy, for instance, might be: what if my hot boss fucked me over his desk at work, because he's hot and I want to sleep with him. A metaphoric version of the same fantasy might be: what if I was so insanely desirable that my boss fucked me despite his being married and straight and me being a man. To take another example, and one which has been studied extensively by psychologists, literary historians and academics alike, rape fantasies are commonplace, not because the vast majority of people are rape apologists, but because, at the level of metaphor, they allow the possibility of sex without having to take ownership of one's own desires, which is of particular value if, say, you've been taught that wanting sex makes you slutty and wrong and gross; which is, in turn, why so many old Harlequin and Mills & Boon romances feature encounters that we'd now class as non-consensual between the hero and heroine. It wasn't because the writers didn't understand rape: it was because they were writing in a time where women were taught that wanting sex made them harlots, such that it was difficult for them to fantasize without shame. The hero knowing what the heroine "really" wanted and giving it to her despite her protests was a loophole. I could go on, but the key point is this: given that nobody on Earth can perfectly control their own arousal, it is imperative to acknowledge that being turned on by something doesn't mean wanting it in real life, because the alternative is forcing yourself to choose between sexual shame and justifying it in real life. And neither of those things has ever led anywhere good.

i'm a horror writer and no one's EVER asked me if i want to put parasitic wasps in someone's eyeballs irl. what do I have to do to get podcasters to bring the same energy to the interview as people who don't like Game of Thrones bring to the blog post?

possessed by a racecar(tragic)

"ARNGHERRANHGERGNAHGHGERNAGH"

Baby