fuck around and find out

6 non-selfie pictures, tagged by @falling-through-a-trapdoor :3 last one is from a stranger i met in a coffeeshop who had just returned from damascus

i’m too anxious to tag people but psst @terkaterr wanna share snow pictures?

oooh thanks for the tag!!!!

these are my 6 non-selfie pics from recently... haven't taken many pictures as of late honestly but here are some

no pressure tagging @huginsmemory and anyone who sees this and wants to join in!

oh boy i sure do love having tons of trinkets

the nefarious dust particle:

he'll be a woman by the time i'm done with her

Fibre crafts are 50% soothing repetitive action and 50% "God Fucking Damnit"

sorry for being indecisive, I haven’t had any prophetic dreams to guide me in a while

i’m an aspiring film watcher

This a a reminder to not fall victim to the sunk-cost fallacy. Just because you invested time and energy into something, does not mean you should indefinitely waste more time and energy on it, if you decide it’s not what you want anymore. This goes for anything, from books, to relationships, to jobs, to hobbies, etc.

If it’s not serving you anymore, move on.

This is honestly one of the places I find Marie Kondo's advice most helpful. I stop, look at the thing I've spent time and money on only to realize I dislike, and I say, "Thank you for teaching me something about myself and my preferences. I think I've learned this particular lesson and we can part ways now."

And then I don't feel like I "wasted" things or made a mistake. I just tried one path of learning about myself, learned something, and now it's time for a different path. Works a lot better for my brain.

The time Marie Kondo said "you can thank a a shirt you've never worn for teaching you about your taste", thereby making it NOT A WASTE literally rewired my whole brain. Acknowledge the thing and move forward, even if that means leaving the thing behind.

is anyone else also doing ultimately fine + dying of stress + it’s not that bad + if i don’t wake up tomorrow hotter and better at every hobby its fucking over for me

you deserved a good childhood. you did not deserve what they put you through. it wasn’t your fault even if they blamed it on you. you were just a kid who should have been given a chance to just be a kid.

today's potentially cold take is that a whole lot of people in fandom have a 'skinny fetish' and just don't call it that because they don't realise that's what it is

to elaborate: a lot of what people call "sexual preferences" are really just fetishes without the subversive element. liking big boobs is a preference, but liking really, really big boobs is a fetish. having a thing for hands is a preference, but having a thing for feet is a fetish. being attracted to skinny girls is a preference, but being attracted to fat girls is a fetish. and so on.

i've read a lot of literature that tackles eating disorders and body dysmorphia. but one of the most triggering things i've ever read was a fic in which one of the characters was very thin, and the narrator was constantly waxing lyrical about how beautiful his thinness was - describing his prominent ribs, his delicate collarbones, his tiny wrists, how frail and breakable he looked, how small his waist was. at one point the love interest casually said he'd break up with him if he ever got fat and it was just skimmed over as a cute bit of banter, like that's not a completely insane thing to say even as a joke.

if the character had been overweight this would have absolutely been classed as a fetish fic. but it wasn't. it had tens of thousands of hits - it was one of the most popular works in that fandom. someone in the comments requested that some content warnings be added, as they had an ED and had found it distressing to read. they were ignored. the fic stayed untagged.

and like, that's an intense example, but it's absolutely not an outlier. i've read tons of fics where the author takes a character with a canonically average-to-slender build and portrays them as borderline emaciated, with constant commentary on how fragile and delicate they look and exchanges about how they need to eat more. (contrast with "fat fetish" or "belly kink" fics, which from what i've seen are always appropriately tagged and described; you're never going to stumble into one of those by accident.) once you start noticing it you see it everywhere. anyway i think fanartists and writers should start taking skinny characters and making them fat, just to balance things out. it's equality :)

that "most fanfiction that gets published as a novel is bad because it's always the weirdest people writing it" post is so fascinating in the way it very clearly eschews any traditional definitions of words to simply use 'normal' as shorthand for 'good' and 'weird' as shorthand for 'bad'

like. i think boring heterosexual women writing boring heterosexual romance novels with standard tropes is extremely 'normal' actually by any meaningful definition of the word. it is literally one of the most conventional, mainstream forms of publishing that exists. there's nothing 'weird' about it, or the people doing it, by any societal standard. what they mean to say is that those books and fanfictions are bad. (which, for what it's worth, i agree - they largely are bad.)

it invokes 'normality' as a moral framework while completely detaching it from its descriptive meaning. it's using these terms as pure value judgments to disguise what's essentially just taste-based criticism.

so the real subtext is about 'weird' secretly meaning 'people I don't respect' rather than anything related to statistical prevalence or social conformity.

what's most revealing about this rhetoric is how it elevates social conformity to a moral imperative without explicitly defending that position. in this case with the post, 'normality' means goodness creatively and in other contexts 'normality' gets used to mean goodness morally.

e.g there are a lot of posts that follow the general pattern of "are you normal about [xyz]". like "sure you say you support neurodivergent people but are you normal about autistic people who stim loudly in public. you say you support trans rights but are you normal about trans people who don't pass. you say you're a feminist but are you normal about fat women" etc etc etc. it's a common type of post; i've certainly shared similar posts before, but it's interesting, right, because ableism, transphobia, fatphobia are in fact exceedingly 'normal'. obviously everyone knows what is meant when someone says 'are you normal about [xyz]'; i'm not trying to be all 'um actually', about it, but it is very interesting that 'are you normal' gets used to mean, literally, 'are you moral'. much like how 'weird' and 'untalented' are used synonymously in the above post, 'weird' and 'immoral' become synonymous in this other context.

the sleight of hand here is in presenting 'normality' as a natural, obvious basis for determining both moral worth and artistic quality. people get to invoke the spectre of 'weirdness' as inherently problematic without ever having to defend why social conformity should be valued in the first place. when they say boring tropey published romance novels are written by 'weird' people (when by any meaningful definition of the word, they're not and in fact the best writers are usually freaks. stop insulting freaks' good name by comparing them to love hypothesis slop!!), they're reinforcing the unexamined premise that 'normality' is the proper standard for judging both people and their creative work.

it reinforces the idea that normality itself is inherently desirable, that deviation from social norms is inherently suspect, and it does this without ever having to openly argue for conformity as a value, because it presents that connection as self-evident.

for me to like a character one thing they have to be is highly hurtable

This is soooo #me when I’ve slighted a powerful deity who transmogrified me and am now forced to live my days as an omen of misfortune