Hello

Hey my maggots who're stuck in the education system right now. This is a long post but... but I know how many of you need to hear this, so please do. I just want you to know...

I'm proud of you. I'm so, so proud of you.

For continuing to survive in a system that's so bullshit that it can fail you at art, give you a grade for composing music, decide your seat in a medical college based on multiple choice questions about obscure ecology statistics (that are probably outdated), and decide whether or not you should study literature based on your summary of a pre-approved book.

I'm so proud of you.

i see you, I know you're exhausted, you're losing the love for subjects that were once your passion but now are ruined, you're burnt out and scared, you're studying things you don't even care about.

I know there are some of you who feel guilty even taking the time to read these words. I know, because I was there.

I'm proud of you for every second you spend doing the things you love, for every second you've spent trying so hard, for every second you've spent resting, for every second you've spent doing ridiculous things that made you smile and laugh and cry, for every second you studied and every second that you didn't, for every second you've spent wasting time because hey the point is that you lived that time and that's amazing in itself.

It's a fucked up system. It's broken and deeply flawed on every level, from the administration to the teaching to the budget to the students' mentality to the politics to the inclusivity... it's all fucked.

The more you recognise that, the closer you'll get to maybe realising that truth. That your talent and love for a subject, for an art form, for a branch of science or mathematics or a language, cannot possibly be measured in fucking numbers or alphabets from A to F.

The very idea is ridiculous, yet here we are, believing it.

Let's not anymore. It'll take a while to push it out of our head. But we can do it.

Yeah?

Tell yourself, and the people you know who are at any stage of education right now, all of this. It's not your fault. You're doing so well. I'm proud of you. So much of this is out of your control, with factors that shouldn't matter affecting your grade, with things happening that you can't help. So I'm proud of you. For being you and living. I'm sorry if you don't hear it enough, because you should.

i started working on this thing back in january, as russian troops were gathering around our borders, and i got around to finishing it a couple months later, after they retreated from kyiv and my lucky family and i were able to get back home.

for half of the process i was asking myself, “is making this even worth it if it’s going to be bombed to ashes in a couple of weeks?” (the answer was yes); for the other half, i was asking myself how and why do you even make a house now that there are dead and gutted houses all around (the answer was “well, what else is there to do anyway”).

was aiming for the “small ukrainian granny’s apartment” vibe with soviet era “ugly 70s brown” color furniture and a bit of a witchy/magical realism touch :’) details + a bit of ukrainian folk trivia below!

The absolutely pervasive mentality that unwanted criticism or critique shouldn't be given and should be ignored is why fans of color don't stay in fan spaces.

And I am not going to mince words here:

A lot of you are racist. A lot of your fan works are racist.

That might have been difficult to hear. And if it was, you should probably reflect on why that was.

"Fandom etiquette" has created a space where fans of color either bite our tongues and eventually leave or say something, get dogged on, and then eventually leave.

If I say "I am uncomfortable with fandom's tendency to write trans men as feminine and submissive" I do not mean "I think every person who writes feminine submissive trans men should be chased with pitchforks". I don't even mean "any cis-person who writes feminine or submissive trans men should be chased with pitchforks". I mean "I would like writers to seriously think about why this is so common, why they write that, and if it fairly and genuinely engages with what it means to be a trans man, or if they just think it's hot when submissive people have vaginas and didn't want to write omegaverse of m/f".

Similarly, when people say "fandom is systemically less interested in black characters, less willing to give flat black characters rich fanon than flat white characters, and less interested in black characters in ships", the response is not to explain why you, personally, just happen to like popular white guy in that fanon. Your job is to look at yourself and ask if you tend to "just happen to be more interested" in the popular white guy across fandoms, be honest, and start unpacking that. Sometimes it's easier to love the flat character who's already getting 10,000 fics with headcanons and art and meta.

If somebody says "I wish there were more gluten free options at the potluck. I hate always showing up and not finding anything I can eat*", they are not asking you to throw your cake in the trash and weep. They do not want to hear your long speech about how actually this is your grandmother's recipe, and you've tried it with rice flour actually, but it just didn't work. You think about what you can do, and you listen to how they feel.

of critters in clover