*pops my head into your inbox at the mention of my latest OT3* Just wanted to say that I totally see it that way too. 💜 Post-canon for me is like: They negotiated the polyamory through letters, somehow (I know there were censors, but *handwaves*) and when Hawkeye finally got discharged, he just went home to wait with their wife. 🥺

—No GFA Anon

yeah thats how I typically view it! BJ wouldnt be able to keep that from Peg if his life depended on it so I imagine there was a lot of letters and phone calls about it. though I do think that it starts off as more of a Peg and Hawkeye are both with BJ situation, and the feelings between Hawkeye and Peg develop over time later in post-canon. at some point ill click together some sort of timeline in my head but atm im just vibing with scenes and scenarios

Alligator Body Language and You, or: How To Know When An Alligator On Social Media is Being Stressed for Views

Alligators are wild animals. Despite the idiotic claims of animal abusers like Jay Brewer, they cannot be domesticated, which means they are always going to react on the same natural instincts they've had for millions of years. Habituated, yes. Tamed, yes. Trained, definitely. Crocodilians can form bonds with people- they're social and quite intelligent. They can solve problems, use tools, and they're actually quite playful. Alligators are also really good at communicating how they're feeling, but to somebody who doesn't spend much time around them, their body language can be a bit mystifying. And it doesn't help when social media influencers are saying shit like this:

That is not what a happy gator looks like.

That's a terrified, furious gator who isn't attacking because the ogre handling her has her in a chokehold. She's doing everything she can to express her displeasure, and he's lying about it because he knows his audience doesn't even know how to think critically about what he's doing. He knows that because his audience doesn't know anything about these animals, he can get away with it. This I think is why I hate him so much- he deliberately miseducates his audience. He knows what he's doing is factually inaccurate, he just doesn't care because attention means more to him than anything else in the world.

Let's change that! Here are two really important lessons for understanding alligator body language on social media.

Lesson 1: Alligators Don't Smile (in fact, most animals don't)

So what's going on in this video? Jay Brewer is aggressively choking his white alligator Coconut while scrubbing algae off of her with a toothbrush. And make no mistake, he is digging into the creature's throat while she is visibly distressed. He claims she's happy- but she's not. He is willfully misrepresenting what this animal is feeling. That's a problem, because people... well, we actually kind of suck at reading other species' body language. The reason for this is that we tend to overlay our own responses on their physical cues, and that's a problem. For example, let's look at an animal with a really similar face to ours, the chimpanzee. Check out Ama's toothy grin!

Wait, no. That's not a happy smile. That's a threat display. When a chimpanzee "smiles," it's either terrified and doing a fear grimace, or it's showing you its teeth because it intends on using them in your face.

How about a dog? Look at my smiling, happy puppy!

Oh wait no, this is a picture of Ryder when he was super overwhelmed by noise and people during a holiday party. He'd hopped up in my sister's lap to get away from stuff that was happening on the floor and was panting quite heavily. See the tension in the corners of his mouth and his eyes? A lot of the time when a dog "smiles," the smile isn't happy. It's stress! Why Animals Do The Thing has a nice writeup about that, but the point is, our body language is not the same as other species. And for reptiles, body language is wildly different.

For instance, look at these two alligators. Pretty cute, right? Look at 'em, they're posing for a Christmas card or something! How do you think they're feeling?

Well, I'll tell you how the normal one is feeling. He's annoyed! Why is he annoyed? Because the albino just rolled up, pushed another gator off the platform, and is trying to push this guy, too. I know this because I actually saw it happen. It was pretty funny, not gonna lie. He's not gaping all the way, but he was hissing- you can actually see him getting annoyed in the sequence I took right before this shot. Look at him in this first shot here- he's just relaxing, and you can see he isn't gaping even a little bit.

By the end, he's expressing displeasure, but not enough to actually do anything about it. He's annoyed, but he's comfy and that's where one of the best basking areas is, so he'll put up with it.

Reptiles open their mouths wide for a lot of reasons, but never because they are actively enjoying a sensation. Unless they're eating. No reptile smiles- they can't. They don't even have moveable lips. If a reptile is gaping, it's doing so because:

It is doing a threat display.

It is making certain vocalizations, all of which are threats. Alligators are one of the rare reptiles that do regularly vocalize, but most of their calls aren't made with a wide open mouth.

It is about to bite something delicious or somebody stupid. Check out this video- virtually all of the gaping here is anticipatory because these trained gators know darn well that the bowl is full of delicious snacks. (I have some issues with Florida's Wildest, but the man knows how to train a gator AND he is honest about explaining what they're doing and why, and all of his animals are healthy and well-cared for, and he doesn't put the public or his staff at risk- just himself.)

It's too hot and it has opened its mouth to vent some of that heat and thermoregulate. This is the main reason why alligators will often have their mouths part of the way open, but sometimes they'll open all the way for thermoregulation. This is what a thermoregulatory gape looks like- usually it's not all the way open, kinda more like < rather than V, but you can't say that 100% of the time. Additionally, a thermoregulatory gape... typically happens when it's hot out. If they're inside, maybe they've been under their basking light for too long. Heat's the dominant factor, is what I'm getting at.

There is another reason that a captive crocodilian might be gaping, and that's because it's doing so on command. Some places have their gators trained to gape on cue, like St. Augustine Alligator Farm and other good zoos. They have the animals do this in presentations that are genuinely educational. They ask the animals to open their mouths so that they can show off their teeth and demonstrate how their tongues seal off the back of their mouth. They'll also do it as part of routine healthcare, because looking at their teeth is important.

In this case, the animals aren't gaping because they're stressed, they're gaping because they know they're gonna get a piece of chicken or fish if they do it. And what's more, they're doing it on cue. They have a specific command or signal that tells them to open wide. It's not an instinctive response to a situation. It's trained. If the animal provides the behavior after a cue, the situation is much less likely to be negatively impactful.

It's also important to remember that there's a difference between a partially open mouth and a gape! As discussed above, alligators will often have their mouths a little bit open just to maintain temperature homeostasis. It helps them stay comfy, temperature-wise. These guys are all doing thermoregulatory open-mouthed behavior- that slight open and relaxed body posture is a dead giveaway. (That and it's the hottest spot in the enclosure.)

Lesson 2: A Happy Gator Is A Chill Gator

So if alligators don't smile or have facial expressions other than the :V that typically signifies distress, how else can you tell how they're feeling? One way is stillness. See, alligators subscribe to the philosophy of if it sucks... hit da bricks.

Basically, if they hate it, they'll leave. Unless, y'know, somebody has their meaty claws digging into their throat or is otherwise restraining them. (Restraint isn't always bad, btw. Sometimes the animal is going through a medical thing or needs to be restrained for their safety- which a responsible educator will explain.)

Let's look at a very similar scenario, in which a captive alligator is getting his back scrubbed.

As you can see, it's quite different. First, he's not being restrained at all. Second, look at how relaxed he is! He's just chilling there vibing! He could simply get up and leave if he wanted to, because he's not being held. Towards the end of the video, as he lifts his head, you can see that his respiratory rate is very even as his throat flutters a bit. I'm not sure what this facility is, so I can't comment on care/general ethics, but like. In this specific case, this is an alligator enjoying being scrubbed! And you can tell because he's not doing anything. A happy gator is content to be doing what they're doing.

Why Should I Listen To You?

Now, you should ask yourself, why should you listen to me? Why should you trust me, who does not own an alligator, versus Jay Brewer, who owns several?

Well, first off, there's no profit for me in telling you that what you're seeing on social media is in fact not what you're being told you're seeing. I'm not getting paid to do this. That's the thing with people who make social media content. The big names aren't doing it just for fun. They're doing it for money. Whether that's profit through partnerships or sponsorships, or getting more people to visit their facilities, or ad revenue, you can't ignore the factor of money. And this is NOT a bad thing, because it allows educators to do what they're passionate about! People deserve to be paid for the work that they do!

But the problem starts when you chase the algorithm instead of actually educating. A "smiling" alligator gets the views, and if people don't know enough to know better, it keeps getting the views. People love unconventional animal stories and they want those animals to be happy- but the inability to even know where to start with critically evaluating these posts really hinders the ability to spread real information. Like, this post will probably get a couple hundred notes, but that video of Coconut being scrubbed had almost 400,000 likes when I took that screenshot. Think about how many eyeballs that's reached by now. What I'm saying here is that it's just... really important to think critically about who you're getting your information from. What do dissenters say in the comments? What do other professionals say? You won't find a single herpetologist that has anything good to say about Prehistoric Pets, I can tell you that right now.

Another reason you can trust me is that my sources are not "just trust me bro," or "years of experience pretending my pet shop where animals come to die is a real zoo." Instead, here are my primary sources for my information on alligator behavior:

Dragon Songs: Love and Adventure among Crocodiles, Alligators, and Other Dinosaur Relations- Vladimir Dinets

The Secret Social Lives of Reptiles- J. Sean Doody, Vladimir Dinets, Gordon M. Burghardt

Social Behavior Deficiencies in Captive American Alligators (Alligator mississippiensis)- Z Walsh, H Olson, M Clendening, A Rycyk

Social Displays of the American Alligator (Alligator mississippiensis)- Kent Vliet

Social Signals and Behaviors of Adult Alligators and Crocodiles- Leslie Garrick, Jeffery Lang

Never smile at a crocodile: Gaping behaviour in the Nile crocodile at Ndumo Game Reserve, South Africa- Cormac Price, Mohamed Ezat, Céline Hanzen, Colleen Downs (this one's Nile crocs, not American alligators, but it's really useful for modeling an understanding of gape behaviors and proximity)

Thermoregulatory Behavior of Captive American Alligators (Alligator mississippiensis)- Cheryl S. Asa, Gary D. London, Ronald R. Goellner, Norman Haskell, Glenn Roberts, Crispen Wilson

Unprovoked Mouth Gaping Behavior in Extant Crocodylia- Noah J. Carl, Heather A. Stewart, Jenny S. Paul

Thank you for reading! Here's a very happy wild alligator from Sanibel for your trouble.

Problems like climate change, where solving them requires millions of people to collectively work at hundreds of different solutions at once, are black holes for internal peacefulness because they give you a type of frustration where you alternately become bitter towards yourself or everyone around you. "If only I could work harder to fix the problem!" makes you exhausted, so you must become angry at others: "If only they cared about the problem!"

People who are already working on fixing climate change need to convince more people to work on it. And a popular thing is to share writings that describe how doomed we all are if climate change is not fixed, how terrible everything will be because of climate change, and how quickly all the treasures of our world are being lost.

There is a particular understanding of human behavior that is being accepted here without thinking about it hard enough. Popular news media shows headlines with terrible prophecies, written that way in hopes of getting the attention of otherwise disinterested people, who will then be "motivated" to fix climate change.

The trouble is that fear is no good for motivating thoughtful, patient, steady commitment to solving a problem. Fear is made to cause an organism to avoid things that might harm it. It creates a brief and explosive pulse of action where the organism's energy pours out as it instinctively, thoughtlessly reacts to escape the danger as fast as possible.

It's silly to blame people for avoiding thinking about climate change. The point of an organism responding to stressors is to avoid them. Oftentimes, the only tool people are presented with is personal choices about what products to buy, which inevitably is horribly frustrating and stressful, since a person will frequently be coerced by their situation into buying a certain product, and even if they don't they see others doing it all the time.

Relentless exposure to imminent threats that cannot be escaped causes Trauma, which severely impacts a person's ability to be resilient to stressors.

I think there is definitely a type of trauma associated with being constantly aware of the destruction of the environment and feeling helpless to do anything about it, especially since we as humans have a deep need for contact with other living things and aspects of the natural world, such as trees, water, flowers, and animals—a need that is often totally denied and treated as merely a Want or a hobby meant only for certain people who enjoy particular activities, like Hiking or Gardening.

We need to expand our minds on how this disconnection can hurt a human being. Imagine if a child's need to be loved by their caregivers, a person's need to be loved by their friends and family, was treated as a desire for indulgence or luxury, or a certain use of free time!

Yes, yes, one person has a condition that makes it hard to walk up hills, another doesn't like the bright sunshine, another is allergic to the grass or fungal components of the outdoor world, but WE ARE PART OF THE FAMILY OF ALL LIFE ON EARTH and WE EXIST IN SYMBIOSIS WITH THE ENVIRONMENT WHICH TAKES CARE OF US. Who showed you what beauty was, who taught you to feel peace and relief inside you in the form of a caressing breeze and rustle of leaves, who gave you awe and wonder at seeing the stars or the mountains? Where does every delicious food come from but the soil teeming with creatures? Isn't the most perfectly sweet berry grown from a plant, nurtured by the soil and pollinated by the bugs? Don't you feel delight at seeing a springy carpet of moss, a little mushroom, or a tiny bird? Think of all that the trees give us. Whose breath do you breathe? Whose body frames your home?

The writings of Indigenous writers such as the book by Mary Siisip Genuisz I am reading right now show me that the other life forms are our family. They take care of us and provide for us, and they would miss us if our species disappeared. Isn't that a powerful, healing fact? I think everybody is so enthusiastic about the book Braiding Sweetgrass because it is a worldview that those of us coming from the dominant colonizer culture are straight up ravenous, starving to death for.

Maybe, I think to myself, humans can experience a kind of trauma from being deprived a relationship with their Earth, just as they would experience trauma from being deprived relationships with other humans.

I really believe that it hurts us to be surrounded by concrete instead of soil, to see a majestic tree cut down on a whim without any justice possible, to see wild animals mostly in the form of mangled corpses on the roadside, to have poison sprayed everywhere to kill the insects that life depends on, to hear traffic and lawn mowers and weed whackers instead of birds and flowing water.

We KNOW that this is physically bad for our health, the stifling, polluted, and stressful environments of a civilization that doesn't know the ways of the plants, but I think it's a kind of moral injury too, right? To see a beautiful field turned into a housing development of ugly, big, expensive houses—no thought given to the butterflies and sparrows and quail of the field? To see a big old tree cut down, a pond full of frogs obliterated and turned into a drainage ditch beside a gas station? They aren't just things, they are lives, and while expansion and profit and progress are "necessary," a nice old field of wildflowers or a pond full of frogs are a different kind of necessary. I remember feeling this as a child without words for it—the sheer cruelty of a world that is totally without reverence for the other creatures.

"They own the property, they can cut down the tree" "They bought the land, they can do what they want with it" <but it can also be wrong, and many people know this on some level, even though our culture doesn't provide us with the framework.

Fear could never give people the motivation to fix climate change. Constant fear of what will happen in the future forces a person to protect themselves from the relentless stress by shutting it out entirely or developing apathy.

A fear based argument for fixing climate change either causes a worldview of nature with no bond of kinship at all, based on the physical and practical dependence on Nature as a "resource," or forces people to experience their kinship with Nature only through grief.

Fear tells us that we want to live—it does not tell us WHY to live. If a person tries to live on fear alone, they will eventually find the desire to live burdensome and painful in itself. I see this emerging on a society wide scale in the USA, feeding on influences from the Christian evangelicalism that sees the Earth as something already sullied and worthless, to be thrown away like a dirty tissue, and on the looming monolith of nuclear winter that gave our parents recurring nightmares as children.

If you go to r/collapse on Reddit (don't do that) you will see a whole community of people who cope with the threat of climate change by fantasizing about it, imagining it as a collective punishment for all humanity and a cathartic release from the present painful situation.

We cannot learn to live without seeing the reason for living. We cannot save the Earth without loving it. We cannot heal nature without caring for it. In order to collectively take action against climate change, we must be moved by something other than fear—and that something is love. Not just love of the outdoors as an activity, but love of the Earth as something that loves us.

The dominant Western culture cannot borrow Indigenous land stewardship techniques as though they are just one climate resilience strategy, without being also willing to change its dreadfully impoverished way of viewing human relationships with Nature.

What right have we to think, "Huh, maybe those guys were on to something with the multi-level polyculture systems and controlled burns" while still thinking humans are nothing but a disease on the Earth, and that Earth would be happy to be rid of us? The sustainable ways of using the land practiced traditionally by cultures who have lived in relationship with their ecosystems for many generations work because humans can exist in mutualistic symbiosis with the life forms around them. We care for them. They care for us.

I know for a fact that plants seek relationships with us, and I was taught by them to see how interconnected everything really is, and how I was made to be a caretaker of my ecosystem. I was, a few years ago, just as I describe above. Too scared and pessimistic about the future of nature to bother loving it, and because of this, I could not realize my niche in the ecosystem. It felt for many years like I could do nothing—i believed in climate change, but I felt hopeless, so I put it out of my mind. But when I began to cultivate a love and reverence for the sad, scraggly, beaten-down fragments of Nature around me, everything changed. So much became possible.

I am still learning and exploring, trying to open my mind to ideas totally different than the ones I knew growing up, paying close attention to every plant and learning its ways. And it stuns me to think—some people write about climate change without this process.

The author of the book "The Uninhabitable Earth" (a scary book about how doomed the Earth is because of climate change) says in the beginning of the book that he is not very much of a nature lover. You fool, love is our most powerful evolutionary adaptation!

gojo x f!reader. gojo and reader are in an semi-established relationship although he is referred to as boyfriend in this. cw: food, tantanmen is a spicy ramen soup. hurt/comfort if you squint, bad day lamentations, and one of my personal favorite gojo facts: man hates spicy food. i also hc him as a picky eater so here we go.

wc 1.5k | divider by cafekitsune

“I want tantanmen.”

Satoru’s bottom lip begins sticking out as soon as he hears the first letter of his most dreaded of your post-stressful day cravings leave your mouth.  

The bane of his existence - spicy food. It overwhelms his senses, a fact you’re well aware of, making it a rarity that you would even ask. That’s how he knows today has been capital-R rough for you and although he wants to help make your difficult day better, there’s hesitation in his step and he stops you on the train platform to put his hands on your shoulders. His grip is just firm enough to bring you comfort and you glance up at him looking so dejected he almost thinks better of his next question. Consideration - something he is not always the best at doing - be damned, he cannot stop himself before the words slip out.  

“Are you sure you don’t want something else instead?”

Hurt flashes across your face and you don’t bother to hide it. Every single one of your boyfriend’s whims is surrendered to no matter how ridiculous it is, trips and meals and sex positions and a million other tiny things you do to make him happy despite his insistence he doesn’t need them. Sure, it’s unfair for you to expect the same in return given you do it with no expectation of reciprocation but for once it would be nice to not have your choices questioned.

“You told me I could get anything I wanted and it was your treat. Are you changing your mind?”  

You raise a brow, slacken your jaw, and harden your gaze that is pointed upward in his direction. 

“I’ve had a rough day, Satoru. All I need is something so spicy it makes me cry.”

The tears threatening to fall from your lash line aren’t fake or for “getting your own way” purposes, you genuinely feel like you’re on the brink of tears and have all day. A scolding from Yaga, a disagreement regarding curriculum with Utahime via intense text message exchange, blatant disrespect from your students that they have yet to apologize - every bad moment piled up into something heavy to carry that weighs down on your chest. Thankfully, Satoru knows you well enough to be able to tell that you are being honest about the way you feel and arguing is futile.

“Fine,” he agrees with a loud exhale. “But on the way home we’re going to stop and get something edible to people who aren’t crazy, okay?”

Reaching for his hand, you nod and snuggle into his arm. Lacing your fingers between his, the stress visibly melts from you and a minuscule part of him feels bad for putting up an argument to your wishes at all. Is this really how he’s going to act when you are so undeniably sweet to him when you want to be? How many of his whims do you give into without having to think about it at all? Sighing, he leans toward you and kisses the top of your head, crowding you closer against his body. 

“You’re not going to make me try it this time?”

“No. I only did that once and besides, their menu is big. You are bound to find something you like if you just look.”

Giggling, you cling to his side and shrug playfully. The distinct shine of tears in your eyes has dissipated and your smile seems warmer than earlier, making him feel slightly less guilty for his blunder. 

Guilt isn’t something that he really dwells on often, as impermanent as the rest of his emotions tend to be, but it’s different when it’s you. Keeping you happy is just about the only thing he hasn’t been perfect at on the first attempt yet he keeps trying and figuring it out a little more every day. He figures you out a little more every day, honestly. It’s what keeps him coming back.

“But I like eating the same thing as you.” Satoru pouts again and you roll your eyes, squeezing your arm that is wrapped around his bicep. “I know but sometimes it doesn’t hurt either of us to try something new or different from the other.”

He hums his disbelief and the two of you walk alongside one another toward the gate.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ordering your spicy soup with a smile at the front counter while your boyfriend situates the table the two of you will be sitting at, you check over your shoulder once before leaning in the direction of the young woman taking your order.

“I have a really weird request.”

She nods politely and you take a deep breath, knowing how rude it is to ask for changes to menu items when there are so many. Despite the impoliteness, you feel obligated to give him a little break while taking into consideration the one he has given you tonight.

“So the tantanmen…is there any way I could get just the broth and noodles without anything else?” The young woman blinks at you unenthusiastically and you straighten your shoulders, putting on your most winning smile. “How about a child’s serving with less spice? Is that something you could do?”

Wordlessly, she glances over your shoulder at the table your over six and a half feet tall man sits at in search of a child that could possibly need this kind of accommodation for their food. She spots none, only your boyfriend who is grinning down at his phone and laughing to himself.

“It’s for him. He doesn’t do spice very well, I know that’s ridiculous but we always order the same thing and I understand if you can’t do it. I just had to ask.”

She hums and presses the buttons on the screen in front of her, turning it to show you. One order of soup, extra spicy for you. One order of soup, just broth and no spice for Gojo. Gratefully, you bow your head and she plays it off with a smile. Even she can’t be terribly annoyed at a couple that clearly has figured out one another’s whims and she instructs you to go and sit at your table to await your order.

Sliding in next to him on the same side of the booth, as always, you grin and he puts his phone down immediately to wrap his arm around your shoulder. 

“What’d you order me?”

You shrug playfully and he gasps.

“You know I’ll simply go on hunger strike if you got me something spicy…” he trails off and you laugh, reaching up to tug on his earlobe the way you always do when he’s running his mouth. “You’ll just have to see what surprise I have in store.”

The two of you chit chat for a few minutes but the soup comes more quickly than you expected. Satoru’s face lights up when his eyes glance down at a bowl full of silky broth, pulling apart his chopsticks delightedly. It’s the same thing you have, just a little different and exactly how he likes it.

“Oh, you shouldn’t have!”

Laughing, you shake your head and follow his lead, glancing down into your own steaming bowl of relief. Opening your chopsticks, breaking them apart, giving thanks for the meal, they’re all as natural as breathing at this point and you smile at him again as he glances down into your bowl.

The broth of your soup is as red as anything he has ever seen.

“That looks like the fire of Hell,” he scoffs, scooping broth into his mouth and swallowing quickly. 

You take a sip from your spoon and sigh in relief, shoulders relaxing into a natural position instead of curved forward sadly. Despite his earlier protests, there’s nothing he’d rather do than sit here and watch you eat your troubles away, pinkies of both of your free hands touching below the table. 

“It just might be.”

The spice makes you sniffle and he’s quick to pick up a napkin, dabbing at the tip of your nose to make sure no dribbles have occurred. This is another habit he has picked up after all this time watching you challenge yourself to meals he wouldn’t touch if he had to. Wiping your nose and cheeks and making sure you drink water.

“Thank you for treating me.”

Leaning over your bowl, you slurp a mouthful of noodles and chew it thoughtfully. He watches your mouth and jaw move, reaching up to cup your face but stopping himself from kissing you with your mouth full. It wouldn’t be the first time but that damned spicy broth is all over your lips and he won’t take the risk as badly as he wants to.

“Thanks for letting me, you freak of nature.”

Giggling, you shrug and lean into his touch.

“It takes one to know one.”

No argument from him.

"Sure, medieval peasants only lived until about 40, had zero human rights, were subject to the whims of kings and lords, constantly died because of drought, disease and famine, only ate what they could grow or raise, and spent all their labor time on backbreaking physical work, but at least they didn't work 80 hour weeks!"

I see this dumb shit all the time, and I cannot stress enough how much none of the people saying it would have lasted a week as a serf or peasant. The fact that you're even educated enough to know the difference between your lot and the lot of a medieval peasant without being a member of the nobility or the clergy is a very recent development as far as human history goes, and it's all thanks to capitalism and the recognition of the human rights every individual has. So yes, you might have to work 80 hours a week and your commute might suck and you might be stressed out, but here are just a few of the trade offs that make modern society literally the best time to be alive in the free west:

You have basic human rights

You have the freedom to choose where you work

You can negotiate your pay

You get paid at all

You can go to a store and find food whenever you're hungry that you don't need to cultivate yourself

You have access to the entirety of human knowledge via a small brick you can carry in your pocket

You can travel anywhere you want via car, train, or plane

Our homeless and destitute have access to better food and healthcare than any medieval peasant

Spices and seasonings that used to be available only to the super rich or noble are so easy to get that you just get handfuls of packets containing them when you order at the drive in

Even the poor can afford to pay other people to cook their meals

Life expectancy is double what it was for the common folk for most of human history

Infant mortality is incredibly low

Entire industries exist solely to create entertainment options for you to fill your leisure time

Most deadly diseases have been eradicated or can be cured

There are stores you can walk into and pick an outfit from a collection of clothes larger than any king has ever had

Stores. Stores exist and you can find anything you could ever need in them. Things you don't need to make yourself, things that you can just replace if they break, things you can pay other people to fix if they break

You have instant access to hundreds of millions of books on any subject you can think of

You have to go out of your way to find an unpaved road. Go ahead. Try to get to anywhere without driving or walking on a paved road. It's not easy.

Artificial limbs.

Artificial organs.

Air conditioning

Indoor heating

Electricity

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. It's an amazing time to be alive. We have so much that we look at how much we have and we get depressed because we think it isn't enough. But we don't have this without capitalism. We don't have it without the recognition of human rights. We don't have it without representative government or people who are willing to work to keep and maintain every level of our society. So yeah, you have to work. And maybe you might have to work more hours pouring coffee or typing at a computer than a medieval peasant had to work in the fields or at the forge or marching 20 miles per day to fight in some duke's pointless war against another duke. But if you think that your life isn't palatial compared to most people throughout the history of humanity then you really need some perspective. If you think embracing ideologies that have only ever led to suffering and human rights abuses is going to magically make your life perfect then you need to get a brain.

honestly i agree about going for money in life cause rich ppl get to do so much but us average folk are like too average to have a lavish lifestyle as theirs. heck id even do music if i had any talent not just for money but the things these groups get to do nowadays versus what life was like before social media came about is a huge difference. sometimes its just a matter of being either too old or not young enough to do something like that nowadays as most music groups seem to sadly be getting younger and younger, i also feel like for those who have actual talent honestly id just go for it but theres always smth like age or different circumatances or perhaps not getting the right opportunities either or being somewhat limited in options. i do think life gets to a point where theres fewer options the older you are as its best to learn from a young age in order to succeed and gain that money. idk these are just my opinions you can disagree if you want.

so many folk fretting about fs and whatnot when they really never tried being single like theres not much responsibility besides whoever else is in your life and again honestly i do not think it matters if we do or dont date an fs. i think people were fretting about jungkooks fs so much lately bc they didnt want to be single or wanted jk for themselves and even if idols do date it would never make their fans happy for their idols which is sad

the fact its even called a dating scandal in korea shows how narrow minded it still is like what do people expect idols to be doing? dating rocks? no one? but i also think there would be some uproar regardless bc of who they are or their title as idols. like they can date a normal non idol but their fans still going to be upset that it isnt themselves. ahh well they cant win :( hence why in a way im glad im not an idols fs lol thered still be many cons or in general consequences. i do think idols are a bit more open minded in terms of other cultures and what they might want in their fs but their fans should accept its just never going to be them

sorry for my rambling and sorry for your loss too hope u feel better soon <3 ^^

Hello! So, I don't remember when I said "going for rich people is a good plan" or whatever but I mean there's points to both sides. To accumulate that wealth you need to be willing to put the hard work in, even if you marry into it. If you're a child of a wealthy family, you need to put in the work to maintain that wealth and legacy. It's a chain of hard work - I personally think you can do anything whether you're old, young, etc. It's just a matter of your mindset and how much work you're willing to put in! These days, it's mainly more about the connections you have and the hard work you put in. Social media can make you famous/popular, but it cannot single-handedly generate millions unless your life goal is to be an influencer doing TikTok dances 5 times a day for a living. I think learning certain skills (e.g. budgeting) are important and can help you establish that wealth earlier on, but you can always teach yourself. I have no prior experience owning a business, but the skills I learned throughout daily tasks over the course of my life have helped me to reach a point where an idea is starting to blossom into an actual product. And I agree, being single gives you more time to work on yourself to allow people to enter your life without the situation feeling forced. You get to become more comfortable with yourself, you make life-long connections/friendships, you develop hobbies, stories to tell your future friends, etc. It's a time to establish yourself and experience personal growth when you're single, not stress over finding a new relationship!! I think each relationship, friendship, etc brings a life lesson alongside it - so it doesn't matter whether that person is the person you intend to marry or not. Just enjoy the present without panicking about the future, that's the best advice I can think to tell everyone as well as my past self <33 It is quite sad, a lot of idols seem lonely. Jackson Wang is a prime example of this, he's expressed this loneliness a lot. Idols have the right to be happy without their "fans" criticising them for wanting a future where they have a family or just aren't dancing on stage anymore. That is quite narrow-minded, I think it'd be better if netizens and delusional international fans took a break from Kpop content for a month and got some hobbies, worked on themselves and enjoyed life for a bit. To an extent, I do pity some idols FS that I read for. They seem very closed off/introverted and would not do well if the relationship were to get leaked to the media, especially if their information is also leaked and they are a non-idol. I just hope they will be alright and fans will be more accepting sooner or later ! Idols ideal types may not always be the kind of people they'll marry - but they do definitely know what they like in a person. Fans do need to accept that the most likely case is that it is not them! However, the industry thrives off of parasocial relationships. It's fine, no worries! This discussion has certainly been interesting, feel free to respond to this via another ask if you would like to. And thank you so much :] <3

Pretending End Cretaceous mass extinction event never took place, do you have any thoughts on speculative evolution and how dinosaurs and their contemporaries may have evolved through the years?

Like the explosion of mammal biodiversity probably wouldn’t have taken place, but what else? Assuming other global processes like plate tectonics, and the accompanying changes in currents, oxygen cycles etc, if you only take away the asteroid and it’s direct consequences, how do the dominoes fall?

Well, AFAIK the asteroid wouldn't have had any long term affects on the planet's tectonic activity or the climate. It was an apocalyptic event for sure, but depending on what scientist you believe, the immediate effects of the impact were over anywhere from a couple thousand years to only a few months.

So the plates would still move the way they have in the Cenozoic and the climate would still cool down and dry up due to the Earth's orbit and Milankovitch cycles. There would still be an Ice Age and animals would have to adapt to it.

The main difference would be life of course, and I cannot stress this enough, everything would be different. There would be no placental mammals, plant life would be mostly angiosperms but not in their total domination we see today, teleost fish wouldn't fill almost every aquatic niche like they do today, and of course there'd still be a shit ton of dinosaurs.

The thing about the asteroid was that it basically wiped the earth clean of entire clades, and those vast expanses of open niches is what kickstarted the biosphere we know today. There would be literally nothing in common with our "timeline" if it hadn't hit, except for some extreme cases of living fossils like Triops or Lepisosteus. No Mackerel, no Poison Dart Frogs, no Rose Bushes, no Great White Sharks, no Leopard Slugs, no Bears, no Giraffes, no Komodo Dragons, no Coconut Trees, no Crows or Ravens, etc.

In that sense though, 66 million years isn't that long in the perspective of the Mesozoic, so there wouldn't be anything crazy different from the Cretaceous. I doubt we'd see any dinosauroids for example. There would still be big sauropods and big theropods to hunt them, there would still be pterosaurs and marine reptiles of all kinds, there'd still be Ammonites and plenty of lobe finned fish, etc.

I think it's safe to say the arms race between armored Ornithischians and Tyrannosaurs would fizzle out, and much like the Stegosaurs and Carnosaurs of the Jurassic, they'd go extinct to make way for other animals to take their place. Maybe gigantic dromaeosaurs and quadrupedal ornithomimids or extremely armored sauropods and pterosaurs with bone crushing beaks, the possibilities are endless and I'm sure there's a million speculative evolution projects out there trying to answer that question.

Basically, we wouldn't be here making these posts.

What would their reaction be after seeing some particular fan art / fics about themselves, if you know what I mean ;)

see i told you we were inevitably gonna reach stuff like this!!! you can never fully divorce lupin the third as a franchise from Sex !! 

not really nsfw but… pretty suggestive talk below the cut

lupin:

oh he loves it. he pulls out a bingo sheet to check off if certain things come up multiple times, keeps a tally of when people give him abs and when they don’t, all that shit. probably bought like four body pillows of himself just for the hell of it, and has given each of them dumbass names like “lupin the 3rd and a half” and “lupin the 3rd the 2nd.” just make your portrayal at least semi-flattering, and he’s all onboard for it

honestly the way people treat him IN franchise, especially in more recent parts, i wouldn’t be shocked if it existed even within the story, and i feel like his reaction would be the same as it is ANY time the public speculates and gives him attention: a strange, almost giddy delight, followed by joining in himself. he’s a weird little man. for god’s sake he’d probably pose if asked and everything. i cannot stress enough that he is the opposite of uncomfortable with this

i gotta say, if we’re being completely transparent with ourselves, if anybody outta these guys would ACTUALLY use stuff like this t-- no, no, maybe that’s a little excessive to say. funny, but excessive. you get the idea there

jigen:

confuses him more than anything. why would anyone wanna see. he kinda gestures vaguely at himself. all this? like, he gets WHY porn exists he’s not in any kind of denial about the appeal of all that. i mean he is not immune either lmao but. but honestly. him? people want to see him? it must be some sort of bit. not that jigen has any self esteem issues like that, he very much is fine with the person he is and how he presents himself, but… THE IDEA OF TOTAL STRANGERS BEING SEXUALLY ATTRACTED TO HIM IS STILL INCOMPREHENSIBLE TO HIM

very critical. like writing columns of analysis critical. this is supposed to be him, and he imagines he knows himself better than anybody. so out comes the red sharpie, ready to make corrections. sit down, he’s gonna be here with you a while: he’s got more hair than that. he’s got less hair than that. he only leaves his hat on if it’s funny, not all the time, c’mon man. he’s not that loud. he’s not-- okay, well, he WOULD bottom in certain occasions, but not every damn time! you think just because he has a track record with huge guys means he can’t top? reassess your preconceived biases about sex and relationships, i mean honestly jesus christ people!

overall has more of this weird. not distaste but contempt? i guess? for art as opposed to writing. if it’s writing, the sins are less obviously apparent. usually. don't prove him wrong

fujiko:

relatively passive about the concept, but interested in the finer details. she’s had many different looks, y’know, and it’s interesting to see which specific hairstyles and colors really stuck with people enough for them to go out of their way to include them while drawing something like that. she kind of subconsciously doesn’t even see whatever is being depicted as herself, so she kinda sees it the same as… any other kind of sexual content? it’s just a novelty that the woman presented before her is SUPPOSED to be her, and it’s weirdly fascinating.

fujiko is very blase about sexual matters in general, so really, i don’t think the idea phases her much. she knows she’s hot shit. she’s planned multi-million dollar heists that hinge SOLELY on the fact she is hot shit. of course people would desperately crave the closest thing they could get to getting a piece of her i mean damn! who wouldn’t! however she would disagree on a factual basis in some instances, as after all, some fic writers don’t seem to understand that reproductive organs don’t work like that at all, but that’s her main beef with it. you want to impress fujiko mine, you have to a. do a little googling or b. get some bitches and take notes. not offended by inaccuracy to her, but inaccuracy to the process and (ironically enough given who we’re looking at here) anatomy

goemon:

buh? huh?? wait. what?? huh? him?? guh? his?? his p

the initial reaction (as for everything even slightly romantic or sexual with him) is baffled, stunned silence. again, he’s not alarmed by the idea of people creating/reading/viewing art like that, but. really? he has to assume people… enjoy seeing him that way, and that adds another layer of embarrassment, but also a weird sense of un-acted-upon duty: this person could be moderately attracted to him, and he’s never even properly spoken to them. he believes the word is “parasocial” (fujiko told him about it recently) and he doesn’t want people putting him on an unrealistic pedestal! or putting. specific parts of him on an unrealistic pedestal either for that matter!!

again, (you may be noticing a trend here) he will only Allow it if it feels realistic enough in his mind. he’s not all “NO! NOT PREMARITAL HANDHOLDING!! ANYTHING BUT THAT” but he DOES feel there should be a level of actual companionship present for it to “work.” if it’s him and some random who tried to kill him for a week two decades ago, he’s will make his lack of appreciation known. silently. because god he is not ever, EVER going to be discussing this with ANYONE, no matter HOW MANY TIMES THE OTHER THREE KEEP BRINGING IT UP

zenigata:

cuts you off before you can even fully explain it. nope. hm-mm. aht aht aht. not becoming aware of this. because if he starts becoming aware of it, toooo many things are gonna start popping up in his head, so NO, HE’S NOT AWARE OF THIS (except for the fact he very much is)

the only one to not have this weird mental notetaking relationship with it, because inaccurate or not, just the fact it’s here in front of him is enough to shut his brain down. the often ignored sensible part of him looks down at the computer and goes “what?? no, that’s not-- using actual police handcuffs would just be a bad idea all around. that’s why they make different ones specifically for this purpose so nobody gets hurt. and besides that, i just wouldn’t do that” but. the zenigata part of zenigata is red in the face all the way down to his neck, only focusing on the fact that that’s… not a bad idea, which he immediately backtracks on in horror at himself, and thus, the self imposed principle: I DON’T KNOW ABOUT THIS.

Looking back, I'm really glad I decided to sign up for @invisobang last year as an artist from the perspective of a non-traditional-artist. I honestly wasn't even going to sign up for it at first because I, like many others, had a lot of self-doubt about 1. skills, and 2. "no one will want this for their fic." It was only after a lot (and I cannot stress enough: a LOT) of back and forth with @kinglazrus, @bibliophilea, as well as others participating in invisobang that I signed up for it at all. And I'm so glad I did!

I won't say that all my fears went away overnight, but as soon as I got the courage to really take that plunge into the work, I realize that all my insecurities were kind of silly. Because it was really REALLY fun!

Making music for fanfiction was incredibly cool. I've never done it before, so it was challenging yet ultimately very rewarding. I got to play around with different instrumentation, chords, and soundscapes. I was able to reflect on symbolic things, such as, "What does space sound like? What do stars sound like?" and "Does this capture the mood I'm trying to portray?" I got to take different elements and characters like Clockwork, Vlad, Danny, fear, hope, etc., and bury their themes and ideas around the different pieces. I thought about things like tension vs release, the expansion vs compression of sound.

Did I nail everything perfectly? Was I The Best Composer That Ever Did Compose A Piece Of Music? No, of course not. I'm not some amazing, professional composer/conductor like Hans Zimmer, nor do I have access to a limitless library of twelve million dollars worth of equipment and instruments. I got what I got, but I was still able to make something that I'm really proud of and that I think represented the fic well.

So as we gear up for another year of phandom events, I hope this message is able to reach some people who maybe are insecure and hesitant to try like I was. Because I went from, "I'd love to but there's no way I'd ever sign up as an artist, I'm just not good enough/traditional/not what a writer would want" to now, "OH MY GOD I CANNOT FUCKING WAIT FOR THE NEXT ONE AHHHHHHHKSJDHJDHFBJHBF!"

(Also, as a writer, I should have known my fears were unfounded. I go fucking feral when ANYTHING, regardless of skill, is made for my fics. Assuming my creations would be an exception to this rule and not part of the norm is Not How That Works.)

Let's set aside the discussion about AI projects building data sets off of people's stuff without permission. Just for a minute.

Guys.

I don't know how anything is going to work five years from now, and that kinda terrifies me. Maybe it's because I'm getting old and change is hard, but I don't think so - or at least it's MOSTLY not that.

Now that these AI programs have proven to be so useful, a lot of development time is being put into them. This means they'll progress even faster, until we run into certain limitations of scale and processing power and whatever. I don't know what those are, or which barriers are hard vs soft ones.

What jobs are going to be either eliminated or drastically changed? I don't know! What jobs are going to be created? WAY less than are eliminated, but I don't know! What will this do to the internet? To news? To art? To publishing? To politics? To a million different little things that we interact with every single day? I've got no idea!

I cannot, at all, predict this. I don't think anyone can, because when people spout off predictions it's about some narrow area they're familiar with and guys I cannot stress this enough: AI like this is going to (eventually) change SO MANY THINGS that you can't make accurate predictions by looking at only one area.

Will we be unable to tell reality from fiction when we see "news" on the internet, or will more robust fact-checking services emerge to meet the demand and potentially even lead to better awareness of propaganda and misinformation in the long term?

Will so much labor getting replaced by AI lead to us finally implementing Universal Basic Income in order to keep society functioning, or will capitalism (continue to) rush to eat its own tail?

Will new tools that let people make simple games and movies and whatever easily mean a vibrant generation of unique and strange offerings from people that previously couldn't bring their ideas to life, or just spam everyone with zero-effort garbage while driving people away from actually learning how to do that sort of shit for real?

When the first major company lays off a huge amount of people so they can farm out all but the most difficult customer service issues to AI, will it go well enough to make everyone else follow suit or will the AI have some random apeshit moment that makes the whole company look bad (please please please)?

Speaking of, how will different people in different contexts deal with the inherent unreliability of AI language models? Pretend it doesn't matter? Put a bunch of disclaimers up? Have humans double check everything? Probably the disclaimers one for most, but remember this is going to impact WAY more areas than we're talking about right now.

How will all of these things interact with each other, build on each other, counteract each other? Nobody knows yet, and if they say they do they're either lying or stupid. This AI stuff is deeply disruptive to so many areas it's mind-boggling. And the thing is, it's happening one way or another. You can't put the genie back in the bottle.

I feel like I haven't been writing enough lately, not in the sense of needing to write a story--although God knows I haven't been doing that either--but in the sense of writing like I used to, in journals, to try to untangle my mind. There are dangers in writing down what's been happening and trying to make sense of it. It's easy to find myself steering by whatever is easily verbalizable, and to be drawn to the anxiety provoking and depressive.

But when there are a lot of things happening at once, and particularly when a lot of people who aren't me have strong opinions about me and what I'm doing and what's happening to me, that don't jive with what my own opinions about the situation are, sometimes it's nice to have the chance to try to unspool it. Am I a bad person? God, what a boring question! But I keep asking it and I keep trying to answer it, without success. As if I'd be capable of truly believing that I'm a bad person, no matter what I'd done. No one is. To exist is to be the end product of millions of years of evolution without the need for self-justification. Our philosophical attempts to determine whether our existence is worth it are just the thinnest possible layer of paint over a giant boulder of very, very old instincts to survive.

The tension of depression is, if you ask me, often the tension between the idea that maybe I am a bad person, against the deeper fundamental knowledge that I am not. And that knowledge isn't real knowledge--it's not coming from some real place--but it doesn't have to be. It is simply a thing our brains take for granted, like down is down and up is up, and you can fall down but you can't fall up. If I'm a bad person, shouldn't I kill myself? But no matter how deep the self-hatred runs, no matter how painful it is, it is also coming up against that ancient instinct for self-preservation, absolutely screeching in your mind like a railroad spike dragging over rock, and you cannot settle it. You can never settle it in favor of self-hatred. Suicide ends up being this response that depends on catastrophic moments; real suicidality can't last. The intensity of the urge ebbs away if the attempt is prevented by even a few minutes.

I have no idea how many patients I've seen after suicide attempts; it's too many to count, by now. But that's how it is. It's a moment that passes. Even if the self-hatred remains, because whatever led to the attempt isn't magically fixed, it's back to the ceaseless tension rather than unbearable certainty. And suicide is an attempt, very often, to fix that tension. People who look from the outside at someone who's so depressed they're catatonic think it must be a calm state, but it isn't. It's a hell of conflicting impulses. The impulse to love yourself against the impulse to hate yourself. The feeling that if you moved, you'd do something so horrible that you must not move.

I've been thinking a lot lately, so this is what I did everything for? I spent seven years in various circles of Hell so that I could be a doctor. Training to be a doctor was awful. It's bad for almost everyone, and it was horrendous for me, with my history of anxiety. Over and over again I thought about suicide. And over and over again I didn't go for it. I always had reasons. Sometimes they were very, very small. A new book. A cat to play with. Sometimes they were huge. I wanted to move home to a different kind of hell and take care of the queer and trans youth there in a way no one else would or had before. So I didn't kill myself, and I kept going, and I finally graduated residency. I thought, okay, maybe there's still lots of stress, but as I'm in practice longer, that will get better. Right?

And it's been 15 months now. And I'm depressed, and I'm tired, and I'm thinking, this? This is what I was holding out for?

But it isn't, really. I'm doing some of the things I meant to, but I'm also changing clinics because I feel like the one I'm at took all of the energy and time and love and, yes, money I threw at it--I made menstruation stations for the bathrooms at work, I put up little shelves and stocked them and re-stocked them over and over again with tampons and pads and Poopourri--and still tried to fuck me over four times in quick succession. And then asked me why I was so angry, and blamed me for my anger. Zero self-recognition or reflection.

And with changing clinics comes all of this guilt, all of this weight. And fear: what if it doesn't work out?

But I still have something to hold out longer for. I have this step next, and then when my commitment for partial loan repayment is up (it will still leave me with 220,000 dollars in educational debt, and that is with me having completely paid for undergrad between my scholarships and my parents and me working) I have another step. At that point I can drop to part time. And then I have another life to look forward to. More sleep. More hobbies. More writing.

Life is going to get better. For me; not necessarily for everyone. We need to make it so life gets better for everyone, but at least for now, for me, I can look at a time ahead where I won't want to die so much and so often.

I have very few good things to think about right now. Any direction my mind wanders down, there's guilt and fear. But there is going to come a day when I am living something much closer to the life I want to live.

Season 4? I don’t know her.

I figure this should be a general PSA as well, but I have a bit to say as far as what my post!Season 3 Legacies headcanons are, since I pretend that like 90% of Season 4 didn’t happen. Even the writers have admitted since that they had to slap an ending on at the last minute and honestly, none of us or the characters deserved that rushed ending or the absolute lack of character development that we got. I’m not here to argue it, or debate it, but because of it, if there’s a specific Season 4 plot that you would like to RP, here are some headcanons I have for how I will be rolling with Season 4.

First of all, Hope absolutely tried to come up with a million different ways to kill Malivore WITHOUT KILLING LANDON. I cannot stress this enough, because my girl would not turn on a dime, in one episode. I felt absolutely stabbed in the back watching her just be like, “He’d understand, right Raf? You’d understand, right?” While absolutely not trying anywhere near enough to save Landon first. All that after having a huge speech about not abandoning him. Screw the school. Screw her friends. Hope has always put her family first and Landon was in canon, as high as her family as far as she was concerned, she even said it. It’s one of her flaws, but you can be damn sure I RP her flaws and all, and she isn’t going to be the one to kill Landon if she doesn’t have to.

Becoming the Tribrid would absolutely be because of losing more people. I agreed with that, but because of them not having Riley or Claire as much as they wanted, you think Freya would leave Hope before she woke up? NO. Do you think they wouldn’t wait for Rebekah? NO. Rebekah was there, and Freya had to be incapacitated, for Hope to be brought to Malivore. Those are her second mothers, thank you, and we’re not doing this Tribrid thing without them.

Hope was forced to kill Landon. Obviously a given, but they rushed all of the last Season and she absolutely wouldn’t have just turned on a dime and done him in. Not unless she was absolutely pushed to do it, and having to do it, she absolutely turned her Humanity off. We can absolutely do that, but this is about where the similarities with Season Four completely end and I follow exactly two diversions and that’s it.

Season Four left Landon in Limbo and killed the Phoenix for good for fan service. They knew the show was in limbo, they were trying to get views up, and it suffered for it. Hope would never abandon Landon in Limbo. She’d do everything in her power to get him out and as far as I’m concerned? SHE DID. Hope exhausted every option and eventually, Landon got himself out. This is storyline option one, and ends with Hope and Landon leaving the school, be it together or not together, and him back to being the Phoenix, or Hell, still being the new Ferryman (with his soul freaking intact thank you), and being able to leave as he pleases with his new God powers. So, if you wanna RP with a corrected Limbo plot, I am willing to do it only under the above circumstances.

Now, with other Landon’s, you guys have your own things and we can plot if we wanna throw something together, but as far as I’m concerned, the world that I default to for Hope in all things unless you specifically ask for Limbo to be part of things, is the same world that @mudbirthed​ and I toyed with when we were first upset about how the season was going. That is, where the Phoenix is a God (because hello show you brought in mythology so how about using what you already had), and when Hope was forced to kill him when Malivore was inside of him, the Phoenix fire that was originally dormant again thanks to the Necromancer messing with him, was ignited by her blood, burned out Malivore, and then eventually brought Landon back to life as the Phoenix, and he was then an important cog in the wheel of fighting the Gods (which are also on a case by case basis because I like it since we had Gods already like the cupid episode anyone, but I also just eh too...). That being said, he didn’t come back to life immediately, Hope still had a no humanity stint, but once Landon was back, he helped her family to get her to turn her humanity back on. No shortcuts, no rushed anything, and then together, they had to figure out the rest.

I like including the Gods because I like Phoenix God lore, but I’m also okay with the Phoenix just being the Phoenix and there not being any Gods. Whatever works for our threads, but I default to the Gods because we had two of them already, if not three, in earlier seasons, so they did not come out of nowhere. Gods were even hinted at in Originals and The Vampire Diaries, and the books had angels and demons. So, I’m cool with them, but I’m also cool omitting them.

Also, speaking of Landon tweaks, we need to talk about Lizzie. I am okay with Hope still turning Lizzie, being a dick to her, etc., and I love Lizzie fighting back because she didn’t deserve all of that, but that all should be discussed BEFOREHAND with Lizzie’s that have specific things in mind. We’re here to fix canon, not just follow it blindly, so we can always come up with something together. 

I watched Dune part 2 last night and I really enjoyed it. I really liked the way they interpreted the story.

As someone who grew up on the 80's film and has a special place in my heart for said 80's film... I really really like how these two films handle certain details.

The religious aspect of it is FASCINATING to me because it takes characters that you're supposed to empathize and identify with, you're supposed to root for, you're supposed to see as unambiguously good and right and moral and just in everything they do...

...and it makes them really really REALLY morally grey.

It shows the people who are supposed to be "the heroes" and it makes them into complex, three dimensional people with moral failings who are subject to the same temptations and vices as the rest of us.

It demonstrates the dangers of theology being pushed to fanaticism and where that can lead. It demonstrates how hard it is to deprogram someone FROM that fanaticism, how they can easily twist anything into further evidence that supports their fanatical viewpoint--even if they're originally seen as a calm, rational, level-headed thinker.

There's so much this movie says and I don't have the skills or knowledge to write out an essay about it but god damn... it's so fucking good and I hope it makes millions of movie-goers UNCOMFORTABLE. IT SHOULD MAKE YOU UNCOMFORTABLE.

To see your hero, the person who you think can do no wrong doing these unspeakable things... and kicking of a holy war HE HIMSELF HOPED TO AVOID... to see him so clearly run headlong into it... because of his rage and hate at the very system that created him... I hope it makes people deeply uncomfortable. I hope they're unhappy with the note the film leaves off on. I hope it kicks off conversation about how faith can be weaponized and how that is almost universally abused.

I deeply look forward to the essays that come out discussing this movie... and I look forward to Part 3--because Denis Villeneuve has said the script for it is almost finished, and he had always envisioned this as a trilogy... he's going to adapt Dune Messiah.

God I cannot wait to see where this goes next. Sure, I knew what was going to happen in this movie... but the interpretation... that is the part that I cannot stress hard enough... I love seeing different interpretations of a thing.

‪12/2/19, 7:20 PM ‬

(Five years ago now)

‪I guess this whole time it’s just kind of felt like, “what the fuck is point?” because I had a good life. I had a good support system. I had my mom, and my dad, and my sister, and my dog and I didn’t really care about anybody else. I used to feel like I had a best friend who understood me, but then she grew up and became a different person and stopped trying to understand me so she could start to understand herself. Which is fair, I guess. Except she stopped even asking me about me and started talking over me. It’s okay to dive deeper into yourself, as long as you don’t reflect that on the outside, too. As long as you share some air with people around you. ‬

‪Anyways. When it’s the holidays and everybody is home, I feel so full. Like I have everything I need. My mom takes care of us because she’s an angel and I really don’t have to do anything for myself besides basic grooming. She plans out our days. She feeds us. I tag along with whatever somebody else is doing. I don’t even have to fucking think for myself. ‬

‪And I know that’s wrong and I know I shouldn’t let her take care of me like that, but holy shit it feels so fucking good to be taken care of. I cannot stress enough how hard it is to even feed myself. I don’t know how everybody does it. I don’t know where they get the energy. ‬

‪And then I go back to my apartment and the ripped siding by my window scratches against my wall and keeps me up all night. There’s no coffee in the cupboard. There’s some food, but nothing good. Nothing I haven’t already made for myself a hundred times. When you’ve eaten the same thing a hundred times in a row, what’s even the point? I’d rather not even eat. Which I don’t. ‬

‪And then you also realize there’s no one around you to fill the silence. No one in the morning. No one to share the bathroom with. No one to accompany you on the ride to school. There’s people in your classes, but you feel alone anyways. ‬

‪I don’t like my friends. I don’t talk to my friends. And when I do, I feel deeply ashamed. When I do it’s just complaints and I hate myself more for complaining. ‬

‪I don’t see them outside of school because I want to push them away. My roommate is never home. We haven’t really spoken in three months and I’ve known her my entire life. We were so close last year. Now it’s just really quiet. Everything is so, so quiet. ‬

‪I feel like I’ve already lived a full life. The life I wanted. I don’t want to go off on my own anymore. I don’t want to fall in love because at this point I don’t think that exists for me. I can’t even keep a single friend that I like. ‬

‪I feel whole and real when I’m home with my family. Maybe not all the way full, but more than when I’m alone. I feel like I belong to something. And now we’re all getting old and my sister is in another state with her boyfriend and my dog will probably die soon. I haven’t known a father figure in my family that’s lived past sixty years old. Our house won’t always be there. ‬

‪What I’m afraid of most is the one person I really love leaving this earth. The one person who helped me through the hardest times in my life, who takes care of me without giving me reason to feel remorse. Who loves me unconditionally and will always love me unconditionally. My best friend in the entire world. I know she won’t be around forever. Being with her feels like being next to a ticking time bomb. That’s not fair to her. Though none of this is. ‬

‪I can pretend these wounds are healing with time and I can write about them a million more times but I don’t think this will ever change. Maybe in four days I’ll feel better for a little while again but what about after Christmas? What about next semester? What about after graduation? What about the rest of my life? ‬

‪Where does this leave me? When all of this is actually gone for good, what does that make me? Everything I love the most is so impermanent. And that’s so unfair. ‬

‪Each day takes me further and further away from the person I was. I know I wasn’t happy then either, but at least I was safe. At least I knew what was coming the next day and the next and I knew I’d never have to go through it alone. ‬

‪I just don’t know anymore. I just don’t know…

really sad to see basically all anarchist thought refuse to interface with health care beyond field medicine and compounding pharmacies. It's all "it'll work itself out" and uhhh no it really wont. i dont know why people write hundred page essays on the economics when we have a specific field of industry so tied to life and death that depends on the uncomfortable truce between a mammoth system of supply chains and hierarchies of expertise and means by which to hold frauds accountable. What we have currently is highly flawed and of course contains tons of fucked up people in spite of the regulation but in spite of this there are millions who it has managed to keep alive, who otherwise would literally be dead. Refusing to concede that point and instead acting like small communities can somehow provide equivalent care to current hospitals helps nothing. And yeh i get that for this reason most people who cannot support mass death tend to veer more anarcho-socialist/communist but even that still presents the issue of the changeover and whether or not the institution of medicine as we know it could survive a regime change or are we all truly to some extent held hostage by the amount of conservative practitioners in the system.

On a deeper level I think it's interesting that one could frame a lot of peoples crises with depression and anxiety about underachievement as being the other side of a coin of a society that deems it acceptable to apply pressure to encourage civic engagement, up to and including starvation and homelessness. Is there any level of ethical pressure application, and furthermore does the outcome of widely poorer mental health outweigh the fact that the pressure does succeed in pushing people into difficult or undesirable fields? Much has been written about the unique psychological profiles of surgeons, but is this a product of being fit to perform surgery, a product of the type of people who are susceptible to societal messaging and prestige based incentive, or of course, probably both to differing degrees, along with a subset of people who would likely pursue the work regardless of incentive structure. The question then is, are there enough of those people extant in society so as to strip the justification of the incentive structure being necessary to produce more? The current system is also pushing many people out of the pool, but we have no idea how many or how many of these prospectives would actually be fit to practice, introducing further wrinkles. Even if you personally think things would work out, there isnt a way to prove that in a way that doesn't risk mass death. In this way, the medical industrial complex truly does make the revolution morally less defensible than i think it was before we had millions of people relying on these supply chains who again, otherwise would not exist. Does this just land back at the conclusion that the only way through is trying to ship of theseus existing systems into less harmful frameworks through reform, despite the generations of thinkers who stressed that fixing the system from within is impossible? I think the prospect of that itself is actually repellant enough to many anarchists that they actually do a 180 and decide mass death can be justified, or at least that this is the point in discussion i see many throw up their hands in frustration.

Re: "cross-gender" trans headcanons, thinking about the AFAB nonbinary lesbian I met when they were still presenting as a cis woman

who created a blog where they imprinted on a transfem character, using her distinctive name and image, and gave heavy-handed proclamations on what was Healthy and what was Gross in fandom culture, particularly around transmisogyny

Anyway a year or two down the line, Lego Elves of all things comes out on Netflix, which I watched in the hope it'd be as good as Voltron since the same studio was making it (sure was a different time, huh) and I make a comment about how wouldn't it be interesting if the only boy in the group was a girl too

And given the trans women I'd been interacting with at the time and how open they were to female readings of male characters I didn't expect any particular resistance to the idea but no

"um ACTUALLY the fandom has already decided he's in a gay relationship with this other boy, and it's homophobic to hc a gay man as a woman bc it's taking away representation, PLUS it's transmisogynist to interpret a cis man as a trans woman without evidence because it means you must think those are the same thing"

The "fandom" was like ten people big and a week old. I cannot stress to you enough that there was no representation being lost lmao—the only canonical relationships were unambiguously het. Also, sure, nobody has a typical "cis" childhood and then transitions at puberty when suddenly new experiences and expectations are forced upon them, that never happens in a MILLION years 🙄

Anyway again this was someone who'd never experienced a lick of transmisogyny explaining to me, someone who similarly does not experience transmisogyny but had been out as trans for years before them, that the way trans women I knew interacted with media franchises was transmisogynist

while they were walking around implicitly purporting themself to be a trans woman and (as I found out only recently from someone who actually followed the media franchise in question) openly demanding another character, a cis crossdresser, be treated as a trans woman