advice i think we should tell children is that when adults say stuff like ‘now that i’m an adult i get really excited about stuff like coffee tables and bathrooms and rugs etc’ they don’t mean ‘and now i don’t care about blorbo and squimbus from my childhood tv shows anymore’ bc your average adult still loves all the same pop culture stuff they always did; they just have a greater appreciation for the mundane as well. growing up just means you can enjoy life twice as much now. you can get really excited about a new stuffed animal AND about a new kitchen sponge. peace and love

hey did you know??? that if you stop stretching and maintaining mobility in your body then it goes away?? things get tight and you can't move the way that you used to??? and when you decide to try getting a stretch routine going that the first week fucking sucks because you keep going 'damn i used to be able to do this no problem' and then you have to switch gears and be kind to yourself and just focus on getting better from here instead of berating yourself for dropping the good habits in the first place??? and your body never stops aging so you gotta keep taking care of it and sometimes you gotta take care of it extra in certain areas because of things that happened when you were younger and it's boring and sometimes hurts but it's so necessary???

i am yelling this at myself right now i am going through An Experience (trying to get into a routine of body maintenance again for my physical and mental health)

Obsessed with characters who portray themselves as worse than they are. Who are lying to everyone including themselves about it. People generally assume if someone's lying about themselves they're trying to look better but sometimes they're trying to look worse. They attribute agency to where they had none, add intend to accidents, try to convince everyone that this is something they did instead of something that happened to them.

the fact that shakespeare was a playwright is sometimes so funny to me. just the concept of the "greatest writer of the English language" being a random 450-year-old entertainer, a 16th cent pop cultural sensation (thanks in large part to puns & dirty jokes & verbiage & a long-running appeal to commoners). and his work was made to be watched not read, but in the classroom teachers just hand us his scripts and say "that's literature"

just...imagine it's 2450 A.D. and English Lit students are regularly going into 100k debt writing postdoc theses on The Simpsons screenplays. the original animation hasn't even been preserved, it's literally just scripts and the occasional SDH subtitles.txt. they've been republished more times than the Bible

That time in ancient Greece when Aziraphale needed a speedy horse and accidentally invented the pegasus

VS.

Whatever Crowley had going on in medieval times

I LOVE being alive so I can be mediocre at SO many different hobbies

Danny is about to be kidnapped in Gotham This is not a good time.

He's studying for the SAT, he's already been kidnapped by Vlad like, four times that week and it was a fucking Tuesday, he forgot his wallet at his new apartment, locked himself out of said new apartment (he could phase through the door but that wasn't the point), he's just been informed that the grant he applied for was denied so he needs to ask his mom and dad for college funds when he'd already told them he had it covered, and just...it was shit.

It had been shit. The entire week had been awful and annoying and he was ready to either murder everyone on the planet or go find a corner to cry in for the next three days.

So when the band of wild goons working for whatever villain of the week pulled up and tried to kidnap him, he snapped.

He used them to vent.

Shouted about how terrible his day had been, how terrible his week had been, how he'd already been kidnapped by his creepy godfather who was way too into him, how college funding was shit and the grant system was rigged, and how he'd have to call a locksmith or break down the door to his own apartment if he wanted to go to bed-all of it. He unloaded all of his frustration.

The goons actually backed off.

One of them gave him an awkward side hug and told him it'd get better.

Danny wasn't paying attention to his surrounding. He doesn't realize that the whole thing was livestreamed.

So when he gets home to his apartment later that day, his door is opened for him by the vigilante Spoiler before he can even turn intangible.

She brought over BatBurger and kidnapped Bruce Wayne, Gotham's bumbling Prince, to talk about college grants.

🎃Happy Friday!🎃

Today my therapist introduced me to a concept surrounding disability that she called "hLep".

Which is when you - in this case, you are a disabled person - ask someone for help ("I can't drink almond milk so can you get me some whole milk?", or "Please call Donna and ask her to pick up the car for me."), and they say yes, and then they do something that is not what you asked for but is what they think you should have asked for ("I know you said you wanted whole, but I got you skim milk because it's better for you!", "I didn't want to ruin Donna's day by asking her that, so I spent your money on an expensive towing service!") And then if you get annoyed at them for ignoring what you actually asked for - and often it has already happened repeatedly - they get angry because they "were just helping you! You should be grateful!!"

And my therapist pointed out that this is not "help", it's "hLep".

Sure, it looks like help; it kind of sounds like help too; and if it was adjusted just a little bit, it could be help. But it's not help. It's hLep.

At its best, it is patronizing and makes a person feel unvalued and un-listened-to. Always, it reinforces the false idea that disabled people can't be trusted with our own care. And at its worst, it results in disabled people losing our freedom and control over our lives, and also being unable to actually access what we need to survive.

So please, when a disabled person asks you for help on something, don't be a hLeper, be a helper! In other words: they know better than you what they need, and the best way you can honor the trust they've put in you is to believe that!

Also, I want to be very clear that the "getting angry at a disabled person's attempts to point out harmful behavior" part of this makes the whole thing WAY worse. Like it'd be one thing if my roommate bought me some passive-aggressive skim milk, but then they heard what I had to say, and they apologized and did better in the future - our relationship could bounce back from that. But it is very much another thing to have a crying shouting match with someone who is furious at you for saying something they did was ableist. Like, Christ, Jessica, remind me to never ask for your support ever again! You make me feel like if I asked you to call 911, you'd order a pizza because you know I'll feel better once I eat something!!

Edit: crediting my therapist by name with her permission - this term was coined by Nahime Aguirre Mtanous!

Edit again: I made an optional follow-up to this post after seeing the responses. Might help somebody. CW for me frankly talking about how dangerous hLep really is.

Since people were upset I didn't include the great lakes in my last poll, here's another one

just finished opla mood

"Like stuff. Don't be someone that doesn't like stuff, and if you don't like stuff, don't be a dick about it."

- David Jenkins

This is a super super gentle reminder not to put your favorite authors on a pedestal. We're real people living average lives and not trying to be influencers. We criticize ourselves enough and we don't want to be held to an invisible standard (we start to worry we fail to exceed our own selves) or compared to other writers (we are not competing) or tailor our craft to cater to a wider audience (the right people will find you).

i vote that next year instead of reading Dracula we do a Jeeves & Wooster Book Club. those two never got the rabid tumblr shipping fandom they deserved (disqualified for the sheer technicality of being published a century too soon). we must correct this injustice

december 31st but i make it silly (based on a tumblr post, below the cut!)

everyone say thank you xenia, i made adjustments for the december 31st context but nyx avatar is still fitting.

original draft of the last panel. i considered putting the bi flag but i didn't know how to squeeze it in. we love ryoji mochizuki in this house.

What do you like about the Diasomnia boys if I may ask?

I always love hearing about the different reasons people enjoy characters.

I mean, c'mon. he has split custody over Sebek okay

also, Lilia in particular has maybe the best timeskip character development of all time