alien cats 💚‼️

god i love when i finally get round to doing stuff that i've been meaning to for 2+ years. it feels so satisfying but at the same time i have DESTROYED the surrounding area. i am so sorry mum your sewing room JUST got clean and here i am cluttering it up again lol

love when cats hear that you've woken up even just a little bit and they're like hiiiiiii oh my god oh my god!!!!! i wrote some poems in the night let me recite them for you. this one is called: screaming and knocking your water bottle off your nightstand

I do sort of wish western anime fans would analyze anime and manga from a framework of japanese historical and cultural context. Specifically a lot of works from the 90s being influenced by the general aimlessness and ennui that a lot of people were experiencing due to the burst in the bubble economy and the national trauma caused by the sarin terrorist attack. I think in interacting with media that’s not local to our sociocultural/sociopolitical sphere it’s easy to forget that it’s influenced and shaped by the same kinds of factors that influence media within our own cultural dome and there ends up being this baseline misalignment of perception between the causative elements of a narrative and viewer interpretation of those elements. It’s a form of death of the author that i think, in some measure, hinders our ability to fully understand/come to terms with creator intent and the full scope of a work’s merits

??? why are “friends with benefits” now considered a cringe straight people thing???? friends can fuck. it’s literally fine

why write a story if no one's going to read it?

Sometimes you don't want to share a story with others. Sometimes you do want to share it, but no one clicks on the title. So why bother writing it down if the only person you can guarantee will read it is you?

You need to get it out of your head. It just keeps replaying in your imagination on a loop and the only way to get it unstuck is to pin it down on paper.

You need to figure out what the story is. You have a lot of disjointed scenes or lines that you know are connected but you can't quite figure out how.

There's something in the story that's important to you, and you don't want to lose that thing by forgetting it. Future you might find that thing important too.

You want to be able to go back to the story again and again. Maybe to make adjustments over time. Maybe just to revisit a story that gives you the emotional release you need in that moment.

You want to be able to use text-to-speech to read the story aloud to you. Maybe it's a bedtime story. Maybe it's keeping you company while you do errands and chores.

You want to find out whether you can write a story (because not everyone can).

You want to be able to have almost the same story, but a little bit different, and you want to have it 15 times with slight variations. Then you can go through your own personal menu picking exactly the combination of beats that will satisfy you most on this reading.

You enjoy the process of finding just the right words or phrases or scenes to paint the pictures you want to shape the scene.

You want to find the exact rhythm and syllables and structure to make a sentence really sing.

You don't really have any particular reason, but you know you want to write that story down.

When I was in ninth grade I wanted to challenge what I saw as a very stupid dress code policy (not being allowed to wear spikes regardless of the size or sharpness of the spikes). My dad said to me, “What is your objective?”

He said it over and over. I contemplated that. I wanted to change an unfair dress code. What did I stand to gain? What did I stand to lose? If what I really wanted was to change the dress code, what would be my most effective potential approach? (He also gave me Discourses on the Fall of Rome by Titus Livius, Machiavelli’s magnum opus. Of course he’d already given me The Prince, Five Rings, and The Art of War.)

I ultimately printed out that phrase, coated it in Mod Podge, and clipped it to my bathroom mirror so I would look at it and think about it every day.

What is your objective?

Forget about how you feel. Ask yourself, what do you want to see happen? And then ask, how can you make it happen? Who needs to agree with you? Who has the power to implement this change? What are the points where you have leverage over them? If you use that leverage now, will you impair your ability to use it in the future? Getting what you want is about effectiveness. It is not about being an alpha or a sigma or whatever other bullshit the men’s right whiners are on about now. You won’t find any MRA talking points in Musashi, because they are not relevant.

I had no clear leverage on the dress code issue. My parents were not on the PTA; neither were any of my friend’s parents who liked me. The teachers did not care about this. Ultimately I just wore what I wanted, my patent leather collar from Hot Topic with large but flattened spikes, and I had guessed correctly—the teachers also did not care enough to discipline me.

I often see people on tumblr, mostly the very young, flail around in discourse. They don’t have an objective. They don’t know what they want to achieve, and they have never thought about strategizing and interpersonal effectiveness. No one can get everything they want by being an asshole. You must be able to work with other people, and that includes smiling when you hate them.

Read Machiavelli. Start with The Prince, but then move on to Discourses. Read Musashi’s Five Rings. Read The Art of War. They’re classics for a reason. They can’t cover all situations, but they can do more for how you think about strategizing than anything you’re getting in middle school and high school curricula.

Don’t vote third party unless you can tell me not only what your objective is but also why this action stands a meaningful chance of accomplishing it. Otherwise, back up and approach your strategy from a new angle. I don’t care how angry you are with Biden right now. He knows about it, and he is both trying to do something and not doing enough. I care about what will happen to millions of people if we have another Trump presidency. Look up Ross Perot, and learn from our past. Find your objective. If it is to stop the genocide in Palestine now, call your elected representatives now. They don’t care about emails; they care about phone calls, because they live in the past. I know this because I shadowed a lobbyist, because knowing how power works is critical to using it.

How do you think I have gotten two clinics to start including gender care in their planning?

Start small. Chip away. Keep working. Find your leverage; figure out how and when to effectively use it. Choose your battles, so that you can concentrate on the battle at hand instead of wasting your resources in many directions. Learn from the accumulated wisdom of people who spent their lives learning by doing, by making mistakes, by watching the mistakes of their enemies.

Don’t be a dickhead. Be smarter than I was at 14. Ask yourself: what is your objective?

Centuripe, province in Enna, Sicily, Italy

Stop trying to be productive

i am sitting on the couch, i hear tapping on the door behind me, i turn around and see this

what do i do

This game has ruined my life

some doodles of my daughter

If you have the app "RecoverFiles" on your Android phone, delete it.

The app is a trojan virus.

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