what a blessing that one of the handful of people who could get away with this level of shit-starting not only did it, but then graced us all with the schadenfreude of watching it

please watch this video of real ass complaints alex hirsch got for his work on gravity falls, it is comically bad

Every character needs to be at least a little pathetic and a little weird. And if they're not pathetic at all then they need to be super weird

saw someone say recently on twitter that "what am i doing with my life????" is a cognitohazard question bc even thinking about it implies that there is necessarily Something you Should be Doing, With your Life, and. they were right. the question itself reframes your understanding of what your life is About in a profoundly negative way

i think "am i crazy for thinking X???????" is also a cognitohazard question for similar reasons. with this you engage with your feelings via the litmus test of how well they compare to whoever is around you, which seems like an annoying waste of time when its already soooooo much fxcking work work just to find out what yr feelings are + what the actual problem is + then do literally anything about it.

i dont know man lol being alive is so tiresome. i would like to shun questions that imply that i am Building Towards something, that i am working on an achievement somehow. simply living is hard enough i am going to do that instead

It's PRIDE MONTH and wanting to start with this little remembrance from queer people in the past.

Finally made some progress on the Upper part of my sphinx piece

Hey… Do you want to do something weird? 👀

there's something so compelling about stories where a character's virtues intensify into flaws that lead to their downfall. loyalty and love becoming so all-consuming that compassion outside of them ceases to exist. duty overwhelming any moral compass until order becomes more important than justice. selflessness so intense it becomes self-destruction. let me watch while whatever saved the hero in the beginning destroys them. let me see them fall to their own worst impulses disguised as what once made them good.

ive watched a lot of ppl grieve over a version of themselves that they imagine would have existed if only they had [better parents/a normal brain/a healthy body/a cis gender/a functional society that cared for them at all/etc etc etc]

i too indulge those fantasies bc its cathartic sometimes, but lately i am leaning more into acceptance that the imaginary Whole & Perfect Me that i think i would have been under "better" circumstances was never going to exist & has never been relevant to the person that i actually am or the circumstances that i actually have.

at some point, grieving over what could have been gets in the way of building on what is actually there. "o, what my life could have been, if only i had been a wildly different person~" well, so what. that guy ain't real. i've been where i've been and i need what i need, you can judge me by the standard of the life i have actually lived, because i am the one who is actually here.

there is no old self to get back to there’s a new u to create n nurture

Yang, 36

“I’m wearing my own creations as I am Hanbok (traditional Korean clothing) tailor: traditional pattern Jeogori (top) and Baji (pants) in modern fabrics with traditional Korean shoes, tassels and ornaments called Norigae and Goreum and a modern version of the traditional Korean hat called a Ga. My outfit is inspired by 1840s European fashion pattern mixing.”

Apr 9, 2022 ∙ Chelsea

i found this cool book in a Little Free Library lately titled READ MY LIPS: SEXUAL SUBVERSION AND THE END OF GENDER and i haven't read most of it but i glanced thru the ol' table of contents and i saw MENACE STATEMENT TO JANICE RAYMOND and i went 👀👀 and it turns out it was a transcript of the statement written by The Transexual Menace, an activist group formed in NYC in 1993, in response to Janice Raymond's sickeningly transphobic book, The Transsexual Empire: The Making Of The She-Male.

i think this short chapter lays out a pretty basic and obvious rebuttal to everything raymond (and all transphobic feminists) claimed about trans people, and also exemplifies the kind of collectivist, binary-defying, sometimes-corny vibes of 90s queer theory & activism, and lays out a lot of problems that persist to today-- the obsession with Defining Women as an innate (and implicitly innocent) category, with universal characteristics shared across divides of race, class, and location, just... doesn't fucking track. it does not carry water, it's a weak analysis, the ~universality of womanhood~ that they thirst for simply does not exist

that concept of womanhood is not fit for purpose-- it doesn't accurately describe reality, and it doesn't address all of the ways that women ( & people-perceived-as-women, even when they are not women, either by the terf definitions of biological destiny or by the perceptions of the social world that governs so much of our lives) are oppressed, either in common or individually based on their specific circumstances. the only way to defend this vision of womanhood is, ironically, to denigrate women who don't fit the mold, to hand-wave away the oppression caused by gender, and to forsake feminism's ultimate egalitarian hope-- that everyone be able to experience full autonomy over their lives and their bodies, that we be allowed to self-determine and self-define, that we all be equally enfranchised and empowered to these ends regardless of the shape of our bodies, our social status, or our access to wealth.

anyway this book fucks and i can't wait to read the rest of it

im glad i lived thru my 20s bc it means i have gotten to watch my friends mature and evolve and come into themselves and just like. level up in general, its nice

specifically re: gender, it seems like. online there is a lot of fretting about how one's presentation will be received, whether it will seem authentic, whether people will read you the way you want to be read, etc etc and i get that and i empathize w the fear but i also wish that i could go back in time and tell everyone i have met who fretted about those things that like.

everyone matures, right, everything that seems strange today will be so normal its unworthy of notice someday, and its probably much sooner than you expect it to be. some of the things you are afraid of attempting today, you eventually may attempt anyway, and keep attempting it, and it will become so ingrained that the way people receive it will be more of their responsibility than yours. every new frontier you explore will one day become a well-worn path, one that's familiar to both you and the people around you, ykwim???

like idk i think everyone i've known who has worried about Seeming Queer Enough has eventually reached a point-- at least to my eye-- where their own manifestation of queerness is not only Visible, but obvious and unquestionable. and its not bc they adapted to some external standard of What Visible Queerness Looks Like, they just lived their own version of queerness until it became worn and familiar and shaped-to-their-form, like an old sweater. experience gave them the confidence and familiarity to express themselves in a way that is effortless and natural and obviously recognizable, at least to people who are (or have become!) tuned to understanding their particular nuances

i'm sure it's not universal but ime, in general, those kinds of insecurities come from inexperience more than anything, and there is a confidence that comes from practice & habit that you will eventually find just by... continuing to be alive and be you and exist in public, continuing to explore and do whatever it is that gives you joy, and at least a little bit by finding the people who simply like who you already are.

idk i hope that's a hopeful thought for someone???? idk lol the people who are paying attention will not misread you forever, and even people who are not ~up on the lingo~ or informed of your Whole Situation will still get used to your shit, bc-- wave of virulent transphobic US politics notwithstanding-- in general, people are decent and want to get along with each other. if they are fundamentally decent and kind they will Get Used To any trivial weirdness you throw at them, and a lot of things that seem like a huge deal when they're new and raw are actually trivial with enough time to get used to them. if normalization is a thing that can (and, ime, often & inevitably does) happen on an individual level, if virisimilitude is inevitable, then maybe the ppl who don't get with the program over time are their own problem & not yours, ykwim??

cadillac xt3

things are going to be difficult. But you

“Resources for writing realistic injuries” no. I want to beat my characters to shit and I don’t care where the blood they’re coughing up is coming from. Like in anime.

the key to surviving online is to give up being sincerely self-deprecating in favor of being sarcastically narcissistic