hey btw if you're in the USA at 2:20 p.m. ET on Wednesday, Oct. 4, they're testing the emergency broadcast system. your phone is probably going to make a really loud noise, even if it's on silent. there's a backup date on the 11th if they need to postpone it.
if you're not in a safe situation and have an extra phone, you should turn that phone completely off beforehand.
additionally, if you're like me, and are easily startled; i recommend treating it like a party. have a countdown or something. be surrounded by your loved ones. take the actions you personally need to take to make yourself safe.
i have already seen mockery towards any person who feels nervous about this. for the record, it completely, completely valid to have "emergency broadcast sounds" be an anxiety trigger. do not let other people make fun of you for that. emergency sounds are legitimately engineered to make us take action; those of us with high levels of anxiety and/or neurodivergence are already pre-disposed to have a Bad Time. sometimes it is best to acknowledge that the situation will be triggering for some, and to prepare for that; rather than just saying "well that's stupid, it's just a test."
"loud scary sound time" isn't like, my favorite thing, but we can at least try to prevent some additional anxiety by preparing for it. maybe get yourself a cake? noise cancelling headphones? the new hozier album? whatever helps. love u, hope you're okay. we are gonna ride it out together.
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i know ive basically said this already lol but a lot of ppl have been like "oh man i should reread homestuck with the commentary!" and i do want to warn yall it is an extremely mixed bag of genuine insightful stuff and good writing advice and then just like. terrible writing advice, and weird off-kilter bad-taste jokes. i've just been posting the stuff i think is good and interesting or particularly funny, but it's not all top tier commentary lmao
if ur doing a reread with book commentary get ready to be annoyed. and put on ur critical thinking helmet lol because you have to parse through so much of hussies bullshit. u have to ask urself CONSTANTLY "are they serious, or are they being satirical right now?" and i genuinely do not know the answer for some of the shit they say.
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Watching my mom evolve over the years has been such a fun experience. For context, she's got nine kids (at least five of whom have turned out to be queer; at least four of those have turned out to be non-binary), and for most of my life, she was just your average Gen-X Irish-Italian Catholic mom. She didn't really do vocal homophobia or whatever, but she also clearly didn't know how to handle it when her firstborn interrupted a Red Wings game to announce, "I think I'm gay." (Spoiler alert: that was me at fifteen or sixteen. In retrospect, of course the Tomboy For Life who had never been remotely interested in boys but was ALWAYS talking about actresses/female friends at school a bit too much wound up being gay. And announcing it. During a hockey game. Of course.)
She also didn't really know how to handle that same kid starting to date in college, bringing a girl home, and so on. She did a bit better when the next kid came out as a lesbian, but when that kid came out as non-binary (shout-out to that sib for doing some of the heavy lifting first), it was a whole new deal. It clearly had never crossed her mind before, that this might come up. Gay? She was figuring out gay. Gender stuff? Whew. A shiny new Pokemon of a situation.
The changed pronouns have been a bit difficult for my mom. The new names still get jumbled. (In fairness, the old names got jumbled, too--it was always a laundry list of names before she got to yours, no matter what you went by, because there were just so goddamned MANY of us.) It gets harder when she's stressed, and sometimes she just seems not to be getting it. I know it frustrates my siblings deeply. It can grate on me, too. You just want people to understand out the gate, to take you at your word, to shift gears without a slip-up. You don't want the awkward conversations, the painful skips, the rough patches. It's tempting to just give up on people if they don't stick the landing immediately.
But if you look a bit deeper, there's such a soft mama bear energy to my mom. Such a stubborn determination to get it right where it really counts. My mother, who never once skipped Sunday mass as I was growing up, has left the church completely because "they don't treat my family well." My mother, who once told me not to bring a girl home because it might confuse the youngest children, bought Converse sneakers expressly for my wedding to a woman. And my mother, who had never known the word non-binary, who didn't seem aware of the trans umbrella at all before her kids started huddling beneath it, keeps leaping to tell me all about the shows she's watching lately. The ones where "there's a non-binary character, and it's so cool that people can see that now!" The ones where "and this one is non-binary, and they're so great, and maybe it'll teach the shitty politicians of the world that they're just people, you know?"
Sometimes you just have to give people a little space. Let them stumble occasionally. They're going to. They're going to trip up. My mom hurt my feelings so many times when I was young, said so many of the wrong things right on the heels of the right ones, confused and upset me because I couldn't understand why she just didn't get it. But here she is, almost sixty years old, and so gleeful to tell me about the power of queer representation on TV. She doesn't always get it right, but goddamn, does she love her kids, and goddamn, does she want the world to love people like her kids, too.
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