sometimes your favorite fanfic isn't a fanfic at all but the insane DM's between you and your equally freaky mutual

all the “peer pressure is bad” education we give kids is practically useless because all it cares about is telling them that Drugs Are Evil rather than the much more useful lesson of ‘the person who responds to you saying you don’t drink by telling you they’ll find a way to get you to is also going to be shitty about all your other boundaries’.

god forbid you teach kids that their consent should be respected rather than about the inherent immorality of all the sinful actions of their peers

I don't read as much fic as I used to but one "tell" for non Canadians writing us, besides the etransfer, is the units you use to describe us measuring something. I hate to tell you this but The Chart is real and it's completely subconscious. Please abide

Also, if sewing is relevant, it is worth remembering that English Canadians sew in imperial units and French Canadians sew in metric. If you look at any sewing pattern sold in Canada, you'll see two sets of measurements on the back.

Yep! I work at a fabric store in Canada, and everything we sell is priced both by the yard and the meter. I'll see people check out quantities in either set of units.

in fandom you can often see people offering up abuse readings of certain characters/dynamics, ie "to me this character reads as someone with abusive behaviour" "this character reads as someone being/having been abused" "this dynamic reads as abusive" and i am very much interested in people reading things this way. my issue is that almost every time this is where the analysis begins and ends, and the moralizing begins. this character is abusive and therefore a monster whose behaviour is not worth examining forward or that's abuse apologia. this character has been abused and is thus reduced to a caricature of what people imagine abused characters to, usually to be nursed back to Wellness in hurt/comfort fics with lots of therapy speak. this dynamic is abusive and therefore evil to examine or find interesting or to extrapolate on. and then you have people deciding to fight back on these readings--not through further examination but through "this character CANT be abusive and here's why" (usually through v reductive statements) or "this dynamic isn't abusive actually you're overreading into it" (granted sometimes i do fall in there bc people migh have a tendency to label even basic miscommunication or slight power difference as Category 1 Abuse or Toxic Yaoi/Yuri even when it's just. having a fight or being slightly annoyed at each other) even when the reading in itself would be interesting or worth examining and spilling ink about. and it's like great, can we end the grandstand moralizing one moment and actually examine what this might tell us?

So what I think is that there's this default belief in patriarchy that men are superior to women and therefore the "masculine" sphere is superior to the "feminine" sphere. And so, as feminists have fought to expand the number of allowable female activities, men (on the aggregate over generations) have retreated from those activities because they're now seen as "feminine", and so partaking in them is incommensurate with their belief in their own superiority. And, unfortunately, as this has progressed, this has resulted in a lot of men sectioning themselves off from, frankly, everything that actually makes being alive worthwhile. It's a misery spiral, and the only way out is to abandon male supremacy.

posting this on twitter will get you put into witness protection

The magic of childhood is that you were constantly encountering new things. The best way to feel that way again is to fill your life with new experiences.

The magic of childhood is that you were constantly encountering new things. The best way to feel that way again is to fill your life with new experiences.