Coffee & Music

Q. You want to raise every boy as a girl? Yes.

Q. Why? A boy will learn to hate girls as long as he is raised in such a way where he is treated as better, and superior to, his girl peers, whenever he is cruel to girls. So, instead, we raise boys as girls.

Q. What if they say they are not a girl, and want to be acknowledged as boy? Then you know they are a boy, so you must make sure to understand them as boy, and not a girl.

Q. What does it mean to be 'raised as a girl'? That's up for you to decide. The only difference is that you should not raise boys any differently than you raise girls, since you raise every boy as a girl.

Q. Girls and boys are raised in specific ways for specific purposes, so it does not make sense to raise boys as girls. If you raise every boy as a girl, then there is no being which is not raised as a girl, so anyone raised as a girl necessarily must learn to do anything and everything to grow up, without restrictions on tasks, labours, or interests.

Q. But boys and girls are different. All two girls are different, and raising girls in one specific way destroys this individuality in favour of moulding girls to serve the same master. Still, the girls resist to live life on their own terms. If girls can be raised such that they know they can do anything they want, including not being girls, so too will boys raised as girls.

Q. Why not raise every girl as a boy? Because if a girl does not exist among boys, then the girl is made.

Q. Why not raise girls and boys as themselves? The self must be made in a world where girls and boys can first and foremost be themselves. One step towards this goal is to raise every boy as a girl.

Q. The way people raise girls is cruel, so why would you raise boys with that cruelty? If you raise girls with cruelty, then you should stop being cruel to girls.

“When he died the ravens sat in the trees outside for a week, watching. Taking turns. A horde of raccoons tried to break into the house every night, tearing at the siding. Eventually they gave up, but it was unsettling.”

At that exact moment my brothers both came in from playing, and all they saw was our mom unconscious on the floor and our dad slapping her. So, like, without even saying a word to each other they both just INSTANTLY start whaling on him, like, full blown attack mode to defend our mom. Which obviously didn't help the situation, but she did wake up and everything was fine.

They sleep

But wait, there’s more!

It is hope and love and compassion that saves each character individually, and because of that, the world. Frodo fails in the end, but his acts of compassion from earlier in the story save the day. And even as the world is saved, it is acknowledged that Frodo failed—without judgement, without blame. He fails, and he is still loved.

And like what can happen in the real world, he is still irrevocably changed by his trauma. But there is still hope—he has to leave, but he leaves with the promise of healing, and the promise that his ever-faithful Sam will follow.

Aragorn, Boromir, Frodo, Sam; each and every one of the characters are driven by their love of the people around them and their hope for the future. They cling to that love and hope throughout their trials, and that bears them through.

Of course people are watching it for comfort!!!! Lotr is eternally consistent in its promise, which Sam articulates so clearly in The Two Towers: “Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines, it’ll shine out the clearer.”

It was taken by a biologist that studies birds so it seems like he knows what he’s doing. For the most part. Here’s his caption:

6.24.2024 ✦ I used to keep sketchbooks filled with little studies of coffee cups, leaves, storefronts, friends' faces. Then somehow the habit fell away, until my notebooks contained nothing but text—ideas that never left the page; plans, anxieties, perseverations. Those pages feel like stone walls to look back on. Journaling that way had centripetal force, pulling me into myself.

These days, I'm trying to revive those abandoned modes of visual expression—not separately from my journaling practice, but integrated into it. I guess I'm changing my definition of what journaling is in the first place—so that it includes collaging, painting, commonplacing, writing poems. I don't want to only look inward. I want to look at the world too.

Disengaging or redirecting their attention sometimes can help. Other people are very good for this and an interruption from a third party almost always de-fuses the situation. Someone trying to do this to you will often only go forward when you're alone, so try not to be if you know it's coming.

Neurotypical folks taking a phrase like this literally is generally them trying to bypass the reminder and instead get into a power struggle, so neurotypical authority figures react to it that way.

Giving your reasoning is often a way of arguing that you are correct, rather than explaining mistaken thought processes for most neurotypical folks. You can avoid this miscommunication a lot of times by saying “oh I see now. I had thought xyz but I see my mistake” or “you’re right, I was thinking xyz so my bad”.

Uh

For movies, here is the beginner's list:

And the more advanced list:

Not all these movies are necessarily good, but the ones that gave me small pop culture epiphanies. It made me realize that 30%-40% of the jokes from modern sitcoms are references/parodies- and these movies are their source material.

^^ This is also true for socializing. So many people I thought were naturally funny were just doing movie bits.

Someone linked me this beautiful poster, and I'm just really impressed.

My contribution: