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Jitterbug

the two most decorated soldiers of the offputting wars

there's a lot of things people blame for why fandoms feel like ghost towns these days, but no one's really talked about the way discord's contributing to it

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honestly still the biggest personal tragedy of session 5 is that when grian joined gem in the tower building. in gems episode, there were almost a solid 10 minutes of just that. them hanging out, calm, peaceful, no danger, away from people that could hurt them . and guess what ? grian left LESS THAN 3 MINUTES OF THAT IN HIS EPISODE dbjksffejw

sorry to be a bit of a hater but i do wish youtubers weren't so scared of making their videos just like, "reviews", whys everything gotta be a "video essay" all the time. every day my recommendations are filled with 40 minute videos titled "_____: An Underrated Masterpiece" where the first like five minutes are reading the wikipedia definition of "masterpiece" in a somber voice with dramatic themed text on screen. please just tell me how good or bad you think something is and use the rest of the runtime to explain why. you dont need to put on all these airs

[two bluesky posts from Trung Le Capecchi-Nguyên, @trungles.bsky.social -

I want more people to consider what art means to them without the pressure to impress. How does your hand like to mark a curve? Where does it apply pressure and where does it release? What sorts of shapes are you drawn to? Do you hold your breath when you draw a delicate straight line?

Believe it or not, the practice is the point. And that whole process is muddied by how artists need to cater to the stunted tastes of companies who don’t give a shit about the process or the artist. And you need to eat! I get it! But you gotta take a step back and reconsider what your art is to you.]

it is interesting to me that ive seen lately (n yknow this is subjective and likely not any real social force just what ive seen) many queer people simultaneously talking about taking back and embodying unpalatable and ‘unmarketable’ queerness (the recent return to the terms faggot and transsexual come to mind) which i think is pretty evidently shaped by the conservative moment were in of demonizing queer ppl and especially gnc and trans people as predators--it reads as a return to queer isolationism in the face of external hostility, imo--while at the same time ive seen a lot of rallying around the “original” 6 stripe rainbow flag as opposed to any of the purportedly ‘factional’ flags of different queer identities, with the assumption being different identity flags divide us while the rainbow flag encompasses everyone and its kinda fascinating to me bc the rainbow flag is probably the single most marketable and palatable and uncontroversial symbols of queerness which has been seamlessly uptaken by those who wish to sell it back to us as gets pointed out every pride month with all the cringey pride merch.... i dunno you could maybe take that as a point of hypocrisy and claim the queer community is itself in a conservative moment rn where its returning to a sense of history and historical continuity (perhaps even out of that sense of external threat) or even that the queer community has for some time been in a conservative moment given the like, decade of identity discourse and lashing out at any people deemed to not have a sufficiently established history or however we should categorize the bihets/ace discourse/transtrender-tucute discourse/pan discourse/bi lesbians discourse (because lets be frank its essentially all the same discourse just keeping up its momentum by leapfroging from one target to the next) which i think is, like, SOMEWHAT true but not entirely? its more interesting to me, in any case, as an expression of a conflict the queer community is facing given that current state of affairs RE antitransness and that very recent history. like, the simultaneous need to retreat to a safe sense of community which is welcoming to the very things the outer world is demonizing ie mutable gender, complex or contradictory experiences of gender, gender expression which is hostile to the cis binary, but also the ways in which it has to grapple with those discourses which have largely defined the community infighting for again the past decade. its queer people begging the question ‘how can we make the queer community welcoming to the girlfags and genderfucks and tboys who are being threatened when we have spent so much time making the queer community a hostile place for anyone with a non-conventional or not easily (or even just palatably) sortable sense of queer identity’. and the answer it seems to be grappling with at the moment is like, welcoming all that diversity of experience but being absolutely averse to naming it. yes we love all the fuckery with gender and sexuality never be marketable but like, ew, why are you calling yourself [insert microlabel here]. you can be genderweird but you cant call yourself genderweird. you can only exist as queer in the broadest possible way (the all-inclusive gay pride flag!) but if you try to name the specifics or use those identity labels weve been fighting over for years youre doing it wrong (the progress pride flag is now ugly and cringey and ‘too much’). i think theres something also to the way (at least on this site) transmisogynistic discourses have really taken hold as legitimate (though yknow i wont downplay how much a problem transmisogyny has like. always been in queer spaces no matter what) in the name of protecting n defending trans people. like its just regurgitated transmisogyny but its being mobilized supposedly in the service of helping trans people. idk its definitely getting a little late for me to string this together fully coherently but theres a throughline there, in the ways certain ideas are being consolidated and reified as ‘yes were more progressive now!’ when i think theres definitely something to question there in terms of like...are we? are we actually? are we doing better by the people were trying to help or are we setting strict standards and forcing ppl to adhere to them again?

I think it’s funny that Winona looked visibly offended at the idea of Will having feelings for El so she might also be team byler lmao.

realizing that big boobs are the reason why i have so much back pain immediately destroyed the acceptance i spent years working on about how my chest looks. lol

back at it again at unhealthy self mandated school / life balance

maaannnn The Fatigue has been so bad lately i just want this day to be over so i can sleep. theres literally not anything else i could do... but i have to wait...

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i think this increasing normalization or i should say this constant normalization thats existed for a long time of self hatred humor is starting to become incredibly hard to bear and i know that im not exempt from this i need to do better at being kinder to myself and getting out of this near constant usage of language like that but the real thing that just makes me feel bad all the time is just how much people pretend that its okay and maybe im a little baby but so many good people are so so mean to themselves ruthlessly and its really upsetting and the thing that comes with the territory of normalizing this behavior as humor is that people will just be so rude to themselves and their worth and pass it off as a joke to resist the idea that they deserve to be treated better than this no matter how much you try to be kind and change it and i guess its like everyone knows the ‘treat yourself as good as you treat other people’ and stuff and i know these days we all have self worth problems i do really and its hard to just stop having them which isnt what im talking about i guess i just wish the world was kinder and we don’t all have to live in this sarcastic nihilistic world where you have no worth and no talent and everyone else around you does i cant hate myself because i dont want to put all of the people around me on this pedestal that theyre better than me while i make everyone around me feel bad because i think everything i do is shit and i dont let them console me i just want people to realize they need to matter as much as everyone around them please love yourself and those around you please dont hate your art your photography your writing your music your work your worth please realize love exists not for you to give only but for you to also receive not just from others but for yourself. please be kind to yourself. genuinely genuinely kind. i love you(reader). sorry if thats too earnest and cringe.

Iv been crying so much more recently int he past few month I feel like I'm going crazy, I keep freaking out and losing it and hating myself more and more

And now my eyes sting while I'm crying and that hurts and I don't know what to do I don't know