La Maja Oscura

My one boring tip to anyone in their 20s is to resist the temptation to rot in your room every time you get a free moment. Dismiss any neuroses you have about going outside and "being perceived". Be a dictator about it, plan your hangouts like they are binding commitments. No excuses! Go to the bar with your friends. Be kinda hungover at work. Socializing is like exercise; even if you don't feel like you want to, you should still do it because it's good for you.

socializing works a little bit like a car battery and alternator. if you continue to make yourself go out and do things, your social alternator makes it infinitely more manageable for you to continue to go out and do things. if you let yourself be completely idle for too long, the alternator doesn't get to keep charging your battery and eventually it runs completely down and it's nearly impossible to go out and do stuff with a dead social battery. you can always get it jumped again by a friend who's willing to do so, but as with a real car battery it's kind of a whole Thing and the first time out with a jumped battery is still really shaky and weird and anxiety-inducing and all of this could've been avoided if you'd just gone to the arcade or whatever

my best tip for anyone trying to get back into reading is to remember that you can read books to avoid other responsibilities in ur life and it can become a vice if you play your cards right

My therapist always says “reading is a healthy hobby” and every time I’m like “girl not how I do it.”

i need this completed or ill die who is kitty?? WHO IS LYDIA

@scyllas-revenge this has your name written all over it. twice.

Ahh my two favorite things smushed together!!

I gotta throw in a tag for @bethanydelleman because I hope you can hear this as clearly as I can!

@hillnerd

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a group on an adventure must be in want of a hobbit.

what if they get back to erid only for grace to discover that rocky has like. a crazy rap sheet. extensive eridian criminal record. he's stolen everything it's possible to steal. there was a huge brouhaha when he got elected to the petrova line mission because it's basically like if danny ocean had been really really good at fixing shit and so they decided to send him to the moon. he's been arrested approximately 12,000 times for public indecency. grace is like (still not over the clothes thing) so i'm NOT the only guy you like to be fully naked around. i see how it is. and rocky has to reform his image and only do his nudist thing around grace to save his bug marriage. the fact that he came back from space married to a bug is somehow entirely unsurprising to the entire planet, who mostly assumed he'd stolen the blip-A and made off with it and that was why no one came back for 50 years. grand theft spaceship. grace visiting rocky's cave like wow cool jewel artwork or whatever and rocky's like yes yes. if anyone asks you've never seen it.

Naw i do declayuh whaay is ther uh sheep who thinks hehmself uh duhtective

Fascinating how what's considered feminine and what's considered masculine can change over time. The rebranding of being a horse girl into being a stereotypical feminine girly trait needs to be studied.

Look at classic children's novels. As recently as the 50s and early 60s, being obsessed with horses as a girl was depicted as strange and tomboyish, and the very concept of being obsessed with horses from early childhood and loving toy horses and desperately wanting your own horse being a "little girl thing" and not a "little boy thing" would send someone from the 1800s and earlier into a coma.

There's maybe a point to be made here somewhere about how when keeping and riding horses stopped being necessary to the functioning of society and became a more "frivolous" thing, it was rapidly rebranded as silly and girly and for women, but what do I know.

I was debating pre- and post- smartphone existentialism with an older gentleman today and he stopped part way through and said “Why are you a security guard? Why aren’t you teaching this at some college somewhere?” And I didn’t know what to say so I went with “Well I used to make art but nobody pays an artist”

I want to invoke thought and wonder and introspection and encourage the passions of every soul I meet forever and ever and dig until I find the glorious potential for creation and experience and joy in every single one but unfortunately I must pay rent and so I stand, a meat shield, an NPC with unlockable dialogue

#capitalism brain tells you that anyone interesting must fight to the top of their interest#and precludes the possibility of everyone everyone everyone already being interesting