Idiot

If you start ballet at 16, you are too old to ever expect to be able to do it seriously. If you start at 12 you’re too old. If you want to do ballet as a serious thing, as a career, you need to start at like eight years old or even younger, because your bones and joints need to be trained while they’re still flexible in order for you to be able to perform many of the required motions and stances of ballet. In particular, you need to be able to perform turnout of the hips, but all of your joints in your legs and feet will be affected, and this irreversibly changes your body.

And yet! Nobody talks about this as a negative thing! Little girls say they want to be ballet dancers, and if their parents have enough money, that’s what they get to be! Does it cause problems in later life? Yeah, sometimes! Often, even! But nobody talks about that because it’s a thing for cis people to do and so naturally it’s all fine!

By the time I was done dancing at age 18, I had been through physical therapy for 3 separate issues caused by ballet. The worst one was because of how my hips and muscles developed and it cause discomfort in my knees so bad that I couldn’t walk very far without pain, much less climb stairs. One time at a pt session, a neighboring patient, who was elderly, said I was “too young to be here”. I was in middle school so I rolled my eyes. It was/is funny to me.

I am 23 now, and I still get stiff in some places, and I’m sure it is related to dancing as a kid. I snap, crackle, and pop like Rice Krispies.

I have no regrets because ballet and was a big part of my life. I just know that it will have long term effects on my body and there is nothing I can do to change it.

But with that comes so much guilt that isn't deserved. As if he believes he has a moral imperative to never be wrong, to never falter, to never be human (or..cookie, i suppose, but i feel like that wording would have been less clear).

It is not Pure Vanilla Cookie's job to save everyone, to fix everything, to piece together what is broken with his own hands and never rest until he can. It is not Pure Vanilla Cookie's job to walk into hell believing he may never return out of guilt for even simply living while she does not.

NOTP: the opposite of an OTP (One True Pairing). It is a ship a fan strongly dislikes. The word is a portmanteau of ‘no’ and ‘OTP’ and thus is not a contraction of any particular phrase.

Squick: anything that is a deep-seated, visceral turn-off. Squicks may be shared by many fans or be specific to one; one person’s kink may be another person’s squick.

YKINMKATO, or kink-tomato: Your Kink Is Not My Kink, And That’s Okay: used to indicate support for fannish diversity and to distinguish between disapproval or kink shaming and simply having different taste.

DLDR: Don’t Like, Don’t Read: a phrase used to warn against complaints about an aspect of fic or meta. A “live and let live” philosophy of fandom, which places the responsability for avoiding content one doesn’t want to see on the side of the fanwork consumer, rather that on the creator’s.

SALS: Ship And Let Ship: similar to the above specifically about shipping tastes.

YMMV: Your Mileage May Vary: a phrase used to acknowledge that any given individual’s personal opinion on the topic at hand may differ due to their own tastes, standards, values, experiences, etc.

As the OP points out, all of these crucially imply no moral judgment of what they’re designing.

Closest match: Bombyx mori BmN4 cell DNA, chromosome 24, sequence Common name: Domestic Silk Moth

Anyway, did y'all hear that they nuked the White House?

Other useful AI Removal/Detection links

How to spot AI Hallucinations like a Reference Librarian (originally on Substack)

feverly making this shit just because i saw this

Markup for the SCREEN ACT and KOSA is going to the Senate on WEDNESDAY AUGUST 5TH 2026. That's in TWO DAYS.

You need to contact your representatives and senators. We need to stop this nonsense unless we want to wind up like the UK.

Call them. Send emails. Write letters. Use these resources to figure out who to contact and what to say. Let them know we will VOTE THEM OUT if they vote in favor of any of these bills.

(To preface I am not a Christian but I love learning about theology) no, “Zeus’s law” is not the same as something Christian god would decree. Zeus does not “love” humans the way that Christian god is described to love humans. “God”’s commandments are for the benefit of humans and so they love each other, Zeus’s “laws” are basically threats because we are not his children and he doesn’t even like his actual children.

you treat a Christian angel badly in disguise and they might smite you. you treat them well and they’ll reward you.

you treat a god in disguise well and they don’t kill you. you treat them badly and they kill you.

you don’t defy the gods, they are literally everywhere and everything. you don’t live under their rules because they have your best interests at heart, you live staying out of their way and making sacrifices and praying to them for your own safety because at the smallest slight, they will literally create plagues, wars, and whole seasons. Odysseus works with Athena but that is because he is the EXCEPTION not the RULE

in Christian scripture, being good and generous is rewarded. In classical mythology you literally don’t have any other choice but to make yourself useful because the gods didn’t care how many humans died in the titanomachy and they won’t care if they kill one more.

Zeus’s law isn’t a decree or a scripture, it’s a lesson you learn the hard way and you pass onto your children. But that’s also because Zeus’s law isn’t even REAL and Greek hospitality can’t be boiled down to one single aspect of their mythology and culture Mr Nolan I’m looking at you when I say this

EDIT: TL;DR is that anglicizing the concept of Xenia reduces it to essentially the most prominent western societal understanding of religion-based “deity in disguise” generosity, which comes from biblical values. My post is just defining the ways that those two instances of “gods in disguise” differ

I have asked myself multiple times over the last decade whether I can navigate all of -this-... just as I am. Can I show up... like -this- and still somehow succeed? I still don't have the answer yet. But this recent experience with you all showed me that maybe... maybe it's possible.

My fear: having meltdowns in public, before strangers. Having my mental illnesses rear their heads and drive me mad close enough to others to have it impact them.

It's one thing to TELL people about it all. It's another for them to see it. To feel it.