Waiting for Wings

Ugly Duckling sequel where the swan is like hey it's nobody's fault and I don't think anyone did anything wrong per se but nonetheless I did feel really alienated and depressed for most of my youth and those years do continue to affect me in the present day and their mom is like, so what you're saying is that you think I'm a failure and a bad duck.

for real tho it feels exhausting that ive seen this whole "woman should be allowed to abstain from X beauty standard" -> "i perform X beauty standard, am i evil? do you think im evil? please forgive me i came up with a dozen excuses 🥺" since like 2015 (and i know its been going on longer than that) like girl thats not the poiiiiint

look me in the eyes. repeat after me. "i face societal pressure to perform this beauty standard. i should not face that pressure. i conform to this standard. i am rewarded for performing to this standard. i need to respect women who do not perform this standard. this is not about whether or not i am a sinner for wearing makeup."

the way teenagers are treated these days is wild. when i was a teenager we were all watching porn, jerking off, and going to horror movies with 3000 gallons of blood. Nowadays they make kids get a permission slip to watch anything darker than Barney the Dinosaur. Insane.

Every year we infantilize teenagers more and more and act surprised when they grow up to be terrified, angry, emotionally stunted adults.

& then for some reason people fixate more on "ugh these teenagers just want to be treated like babies!!! teenagers are to blame for the rise in puritanism!!!!!" than how this is a very obvious example of ageism and the increased control over a socially vulnerable and exploited group

I think a commonly overlooked part of this coddling is that it teaches kids and teenagers to be afraid of things they don't need to be afraid of, which is exactly how they end up as "puriteens". I remember as a child being terrified to change the channel on the tv because I had ended up with the impression that seeing even seconds of an R rated movie or tv show would give me nightmares. And then as a tween every time I saw swearing I felt sick to my stomach because I had been taught such a thing is bad and harmful. I think I would have suffered less if I hadn't been raised with everyone around me acting like mature media was so bad. By the time I was a teenager I had figured out this was bunk, but understandably a lot of people don't. By making this whole system worse and stronger you have teens who have been told that seeing explicit or dark media Will Harm Them, and so they act in ways that would be appropriate if it really was the info-hazard it's implied to be.

^^ never heard anybody specifically talk about this but yeah. parents acting like sexual or any "dark" content in a story or show was going to put bad things in my head that were going to be there permanently just gave me a deeply distressing sort of contamination anxiety

reblog if you remember what it felt like to walk into blockbuster

If you’re reblogging this maybe also do a couple stretches. Gods know our back and shoulders could use it.

i don't really want to weight in on the "using big words in your writing is ableist" discourse happening on tiktok because i'm like 90% certain it's an anti-intellectual psyop to stir up drama in online circles to promote the use of ai to summarize literally everything and thus feeding the LLMs and lowering the populace's mistrust of such tools but i also have to say: dictionaries and thesauruses are the most accessible they've ever been. if you use an e-reader of any kind you can look up a word without leaving the page. there's a plethora of online dictionaries and if you just type a word + "meaning" into google it'll usually give you a definition. we used to have pocket dictionaries we used when reading in class. i have two on my shelf right now that i used in high school. stop letting the fascists purposefully misuse anti-ableism rhetoric to trick you into never thinking again.

What are you reading rn, why are you reading it, and what format are you reading it in (physical book, ereader, on your phone etc)

felt ok but then remembered

we need more grown ass adult characters who are so pathetic and emotionally immature that their biggest emotional crutch is a kid. and i dont mean in a “do it for them” way i mean they vent to the kid and need emotional support and comfort from the kid and it CANT be that theyre faking it to make the kid feel mature, they have to Genuinely need the child to feel secure

Inflation has made me not understand prices anymore in the sense that I no longer understand what an appropriate price for any food is. Is a $5 bag of chips a good deal? Because that sounds fucking insane to 2018 me. And yet, that is how much they cost.

It’s actually not that impressive if you can train a malinois. Their whole deal is being trainable. Come back when you can train a basset hound to do all that

Fabio!!!

nobody ever believes me when I list off all of the ways that humans are significantly less sexually dimorphic than people seem to believe and it drives me batshit insane. “you’re denying the biological reality of sex” well you’re sticking your fingers in your ears and saying lalalala every time anyone presents you with data that confirms that women and men aren’t really that different. and refusing to come to terms with the two-way relationship between the “biological” and “social” worlds. I think one of us is ignoring the biological sciences here and it isn’t me