i dislike how some people act like you're some backwards Luddite if you acknowledge that the impacts of technology and social media are nuanced and not 100% positive and perhaps having rich, conventionally beautiful people beamed directly into our eyeballs constantly is not great for us

characters cleaning blood off their partner's face is just PEAK romance actually. bonus points if it's someone else's blood

christ sometimes I just wanna. steal a time machine & go back & sit down next to my 9-year-old self and just like. let them pull out their pokemon card binder & gush about their holographic gyarados or whatever. I'd just smile & ask questions about motherfukcing bulbasaur & tell my kid self that I thought they were a neat person, & someday they'd find other people who thought so too.

like i'm a grown adult who honestly finds most kids stuff boring, but. damn if i could go back & hang out with my baby self & listen to them ramble...just so they knew someone was listening. i would in a heartbeat. thinking about u kid

it’s always october 3rd somewhere

@weeeeps 's Vera

This probably isn't very biblically accurate, but your characters are so cute I wanted to draw them!

im gonna start a fight; and, at the same time, i need you to take this in the most good-faith way possible, but:

videos that involve body-checking and intentionally (and uncritically) show a mealplan of an unhealthy number of calories are just a revamped version of pro-ana food diaries.

and yeah, i know there's arguments. i address some of them under the cut. but at the end of the day, we're just coming back to romanticizing mental illness; we've just found a better platform for it.

this is already something we've done. we knew it was wrong and tried to stop it. and tbh. it just wasn't enough.

there are people who argue "well, what if you have an eating disorder, you can't help it if you don't eat!" except that as someone with an ED; we are not infants. we know what we're doing. part of having an ED is that you are like, maybe too self-aware. even if we can't help our own food choices, we don't need to fucking romanticize the disorder - something we've been warning you about since 2013. there are hours of setup, filming, and editing that go into these videos. they do not happen to fall into place randomly. there is a reason they are pieced together to be beautiful, bright, inspiring.

there's this woman who pretty much only posts daily plans under a normal amount of calories, and everyone defends her saying but it's better than nothing! and i'm like. except she opens those with images of her showing off her body and provides no context in the video or caption that suggests that she believes what she's doing is unhealthy. she has hundreds of thousands of followers on a platform designed for young kids and teens. i refuse to believe that by accident her content just happens to be cheery advice on "healthy" versions of starving.

for any other symptom of mental illness, we would be incredibly enraged by this kind of placid acceptance of a "tips and tricks" fast-start guide. imagine if people posted pink & pretty videos saying "best places to cut yourself" as if it was a fucking storytime. we, as a society, are so fucking fatphobic that we would rather accept blatantly harmful displays of self harm than admit that we are obsessed with a hyper-thin body type.

i am not suggesting someone never talks about their disorder. i talk about mine. actually, it's a plot point in my book.

here's the difference: i recognize it's a fucking mental illness. i am very careful to never mention a specific weight, eating pattern, or calorie plan. i always make sure to position it as something that ruined my fucking life. i do not put cheery music in the background and hearts and sparkles over my worst moments. i do not film it in bright light. i do not start each passage with an image of a thin body followed by "here's how to look like her."

eating disorders should not be framed as aspirational. and the problem is that society worships the "after" image, so long as you don't get too sick. there is a reason so many people who quit being "influencers" will later admit - i wasn't eating well that whole time; an obsession with food was completely destroying my life.

we let any uncredited, uncertified person write the most backwards, fucked up shit about how to get the body you desire! because the underlying, secret belief is: well, at least they're thin! and the real thing that fucking gets me each time - they make fucking money off of it. their irresponsibility and societal harm literally pays off for them.

"why do you care so much." "don't like it don't look." "so what if people experiment with new ways of thinking of food?"

thank you for asking. we're about to get extremely personal. it's because when i was 18 i discovered "thinspiration"/"thinspo." and it absolutely influenced, shaped, and codified my pre-existing eating disorder. i went from having some troubling habits and traits to being incredibly unwell within what felt like a matter of days. there were actual pages designed to train me on how to have an ED correctly. it was all so suddenly easy. i was sick; and the nature of the illness meant - i wanted to be sicker.

it takes an average of 7 years for a person to fully recover. i know this personally - even now, 10 years from the worst of it, i still fucking struggle. i am so much happier now and i eat what i want and i literally don't think about food at all (19 year old me would shudder) and yet - i still fucking know the calories of plain toast with butter.

an eating disorder is one of the deadliest types of mental illness. over 1 in 4 people with an ED will attempt suicide.

and i'm sorry. i just do not see the exchange rate of "high rate of engagement" versus "the value of a human life."

byler in every episode -> 3.04. the sauna test

Before

After

it's kinda crazy the only person on my f1 Instagram whose stories are full of pro palestine posts is Kelly Piquet

imagining the story from pei ming's perspective is rlly funny i think. this god from all that time ago ascends again (you were there for the first two times) and immediately waltzes into a situation that fucks something up for your descendant (putting both of your reputations on the line, messing up how hard your descendant worked to become a god and how hard you worked to ensure that he would have that chance) and then refuses to let you smooth the situation out and on TOP of that your friend's little sister (who hates you and who you are trying to look out for by request of your friend) is on your case about it too. so you've gotta work all that out and then like. you chill for a little bit (still kind of upset about your descendant) until your friend undergoes a heavenly calamity. and then in the space of like A Day the god from earlier shows up again with a fucking ghost king, your friend dies, the little sister you're supposed to be looking out for disappears, and everything just kinda goes to shit. so you're like. grieving. trying to process everything. until your OTHER close friend goes off the fucking rails with the spirit of that guy she murdered, and then you get called out to the spooky ghost mountain where you're confronted with the girl whose death YOU were essentially responsible for and have never really come to terms with, and then like. you just kind of hang out with these gay people until everything resolves itself. fight some ghosts. fight the heavenly emperor. get your friend to stop being evil for a little while so she can fix the filing systems. and then you just have to keep being the god of love i guess

Did you see this picture yet? The first thing I realized was Michael's hand on David's back and their lovely smiles.

Hello! Yes, I did certainly see this group picture that was posted this morning, after every other picture had been posted. This is from Georgia's Insta, so for those who haven't seen the original post, here is a screenshot, along with a close-up of Michael and David, so we can see a little better:

It seems that Georgia's hashtag has been causing some confusion due to her use of an idiomatic expression, so for non-native speakers, the word "tits" has multiple meanings--colloquially, it's another word for breasts, but in British slang, a "tit" also refers to someone who is a fool or an idiot. So Georgia is saying here that she has tits, Anna has tits, and Michael and David are a pair of "tits" (idiots), which gives us the number three.

I did notice and enjoy that there is a "beading" theme to this picture, between David's suit and Anna's dress. I actually very much like her dress and how flattering it is, and it's something I would wear myself, although probably in a different color than white. I also love the way David's jacket sparkles, and there is something about him wearing it while standing next to Michael (who looks one box of bleach away from Aziraphale) that makes it have even more of a "the angel and the Starmaker" vibe to it. Because it's them. You know?

That was a large part of the impression I had of this picture, as it were. Of there being two distinct couples here, but perhaps not the couples you'd assume. It actually reminds me a lot of the picture that the four of them took in Lapland last year, which also looked like two gay couples rather than two straight ones. They all seem to look very comfortable in this arrangement as well, in a way that I felt was somewhat absent from a few of the pictures that were posted yesterday.

To your point, though, I did notice Michael's hand on David, and the warmth that radiated out just from that single touch. His hand is also noticeably low on David's waist, which echoes how we've seen Michael with his arm around David in the past, and is a lovely complement to David's hand being near Michael's neck. Michael's hair is also a bit disheveled compared to the red carpet photos, and I love the idea of it being messed up from a snogging session he and David were having in a coat closet before the girls pulled them out for a pic. Actually possible? Maybe, maybe not. But it's still a delicious thought.

Another thing I noticed is that there is something to the way Michael and David draw the eye in this picture. Georgia and AL are posing/smiling in the same exact way they do in every group picture...although unlike the others, this one wasn't a selfie, and so I wonder if that could be why they seem to be giving off a sense of discomfort to the camera. With Michael and David, the feeling is more one of hesitation. The warmth and crackliness and connection is still there, of course, but it's also almost as if they're holding back, somehow. Which doesn't seem very much like them, at least from what we've all see over the years.

It is a nice picture overall, though, which makes it unfortunate that Georgia's caption sort of takes away from the moment a bit. And given that she's been in the habit of adding these types of cutting comments/tags to a lot of her recent posts, it feels less like "British humor" and more like knowingly taking a dig at Michael and David. She could have just as easily posted the group pic without the hashtag, so at least for me, that's what makes her using it feel so deliberate.

So those are my thoughts on the Oliviers group picture. I am glad that we actually did get one of Michael and David, and to know that they did have the chance to interact at the event. I'd love to hear what other folks think as well, so feel free to add your perspective in the comments. Thanks for writing in! x

If the devs don't give UI some lore.... then I will ...

relationship chart:

pebbles:

UI dislikes him, hell they are basically one minor inconvenience away from hating him. he's slightly older than them, but despite being "such a brat" (UI is projecting onto him. pebbles is NOT a brat <///3), he is a lot more liked by the group than UI. neither do their views align, UI is an anti-sliverist, and pebbles is a sliverist. so basically UI is fighting pebbles for the title of the cooler third gen iterator of the group (everyone else in the group is either second gen or first gen)

moon:

UI likes moon, literally the only one who UI isn't mean around. and it's not because UI just wants to be on the good side of a senior, no, UI genuinely does think that moon is rather nice. a part of UI wishes that they were her younger sibling instead of pebbles. moon is sort of the only one who's nice to them… thus they need to repay moon by being nice back. UI tries their best to not accidentally push moon away.

grey wind:

never talked to them, sort of wary, but admire them nonetheless. neither did UI wanna talk to GW, i guess they feel too guilty, as if GW absolutely despises them for how they're unable to really keep much friendships without pushing everyone away after 100 cycles. this guilt clouds UI's eyes, making them wary of GW because they so thoroughly convinced themselves GW hates them.

no significant harassment:

rather neutral about NSH, tried to become friends with NSH but ended up pushing him away like they always do. nevertheless, they hold no good or bad opinions about NSH

suns:

UI doesn't know them, has no clue why they talk like they're a part of the group, and really doesn't like them because of this. UI is sort of distrustful of strangers, they definitely live by an extreme version of "you do not get my respect for free"

layout of the group, purely my hcs

extra ^

Why the FUCK didn't Sasha apologize to Quinni.

Comparing your work to other people's is a great way to kill your joy for a thing so let me be clear and say this is not that, I am just a human person with human emotions and sometimes that means needing to be the tiniest bit petty and then moving on. You know. For your health or something.

There is a very popular cosplayer who coincidentally keeps doing the same costumes as me, and I am just the tiniest bit annoyed about it, because as is the case with many (...most) very popular cosplayers, they have a very specific, airbrushed, conventionally attractive, perfect makeup, etc aesthetic to all their photos that is. Not what I personally value in cosplay, at least. Which is fine! Different people having different approaches to costumes is part of what makes cosplay such an interesting hobby!

But it does bother me a tiny bit that the work I put into my costumes is not necessarily the kind of work that gets attention, and it does make it a little glaringly obvious when it's The Same Characters.

(Also you all know the kinds of characters I cosplay. I gravitate towards them in part because they have weird energy, not super put together attractive energy. But that's only part of my point.)

Anyways. I do not follow them on Instagram because why would I do that, but nonetheless I saw that they're apparently also doing a Laois cosplay now, which I guarantee will get lots more attention than mine. And for the most part that's fine, I love cosplay and I love doing my weird little thing and I especially love that I do in fact know other people that value the same things as me & that we have fun together. I will have a great time in my fun little costume, dressing up with my friends in their fun little costumes and I am looking forward to it. And I do not actually need likes to validate that I am becoming a pretty damn good cosplayer (whose stuff is better quality than many popular cosplayers' because I care more about craftsmanship than I do getting attention). I am even thinking pretty seriously about having Laois be my first ever competition costume if the armor turns out alright, because I think I'm genuinely getting to that level.

But it would just be kind of neat if being a weird little guy with weird little ideas who is into the hobby because I like sourcing historical patterns and materials and thinking about the worldbuilding that goes into costumes and creating neat little "in-universe" ephemera to hand out to people and all the things I like didn't always mean getting overshadowed by Instagram Perfect Attractive People.

Alas. Okay glad that's out of my system I'm normal again. I'm going to make some more chain mail.

It makes me laugh how Cellbit and Roier, despite being really good friends, if they are playing something together like for example among us, THEY STILL CALL THEMSELVES WITH THE SAME NICKNAMES THEY HAVE ON THE QSMP.

And also rp as a married couple even out of the server.