"kiss thy homie for it is the will of god" -jesus

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

You know, as the concept of “zombifying fungi” becomes more and more popular, I notice it still referred to everywhere as like a “brain parasite.” So I guess a lot of people overlooked or forgot how in 2019 it was discovered that cordyceps and other similar fungal parasites leave the brain and nervous system completely untouched. They only control the muscles. They use chemical signals to make the muscles flex in real time where they want to go :)

It’s funny how many people are replying “but that’s worse!” like you didn’t know that’s exactly why I put a smiley

putting "agency" on the high shelf of words banned from feminist literary analysis until we learn to use them correctly. right next to "male gaze"

there is a massive and crucial difference between a woman character having narrative agency as a character versus having literal physical agency within the story world. the former is important for a work to be considered "feminist" (though what qualifies as feminist literature is a source of endless debate, and there is no real criteria, and it is an endlessly nebulous term that im only using here for simplicity and not because its even that meaningful in practice). the latter is not because there are stories that will be told where the women in them simply do not have agency in that setting. when we talk about women characters lacking narrative agency as a character in their story we are talking about characters like the classic early 2000's action movie love interest. she lacks narrative agency in the sense that she does not exert influence on the narrative. she may exert influence on the world around her, she could easily be a #girlboss with lots of money and power and maybe she even steps on some guys throat and shoots guns and drives cool cars like an expert, but she does not exert influence on the narrative. it's not her choices that shape it, or her internal experience that is explored by the story. she is pushed along by the plot rather than doing the pushing. the leading man is often the one doing the pushing, and she is along for the ride. these are your manic pixie dreamgirls and bond girls. she has physical agency but lacks narrative agency. the narrative is not concerned with her experience and thus her experience does not influence the narrative. there are, however, women characters who lack physical agency in their setting but have narrative agency. if physical agency was a prerequisite for all feminist literature, we would have very few stories to tell, because for much of history, the experience of womanhood has been synonymous with lacking agency. the narrator of the yellow wallpaper has absolutely no physical agency because she is quite literally locked in a room for the entirety of the story. she cannot exert any influence on the world around her because her husband thinks she is hysterical and has locked her literally inside of a room. but to imply that as a result, the yellow wallpaper is misogynistic because it has stripped it's main character of all agency would be absurd. she has narrative agency because the story is concerned entirely with her experience of lacking physical agency, and her experience creates and forms the narrative. the same could be said about offred in the handmaid's tale. she has literally been stripped of all political and physical agency, and lacks agency over her own body. when offred does (perhaps) escape, she only is able to do so because a man in gilead that still has physical agency helps her do so. still, you would not say that the handmaids tale is a work of misogyny because it stripped offred of all agency and had her be rescued by a man. because offred has narrative agency. the narrative revolves around her experience. her experience shapes and forms the narrative. these are just two examples that im using because they are some of the most well known and widely acclaimed works of feminist literature that are centered around the experience of women without physical agency, but i could keep going literally forever. we have to be able to differentiate between narrative and physical agency in our analysis of a story's treatment of its women characters. if we cannot tell stories about women who have been stripped of agency because they are supposedly inherently misogynistic, we will have very few realistic and resonant stories about women to tell.

after evaluating my finances and my spending habits, I've found that it might just be more beneficial to ask my vet to put me down

wedding dresses are white specifically so that if the bride goes axe-crazy you can rest assured you will see the blood stains all over her and it'll be sick as fuck

pop health science is so annoying bc it'll be like "did you know? eating strawberries will give you mega cancer" and you're like pfft whatever begone influencer. but sometimes then you'll see a reasonably credible article like "Study Shows Possible Link Between Strawberries and Mega Cancer" and you're not usually the type to follow that kind of thing religiously but idk maybe you should consider not eating strawberries? but then there's another article saying "Strawberry/Mega Cancer Study Debunked" and it turns out the original study had a sample size of 3 and was funded by Big Blueberry, and strawberries may have a small connection to mega cancer but only if you are genetically predisposed to mega cancer and eat 50 strawberries every day. so you return to your strawberry eating life. but whenever you eat strawberries in public someone tells you about the mega cancer.

doctors be like "we have no idea what causes this extremely mysterious illness" and the illness is something that affects 1 in 8 women

look i WISH more horror movies were just the directors thinly disguised fetish. instead we got all these horror movies that are just undisguised reflections of culturally hegemonic values and anxieties. like if we got some weird fetishes up in here it would probably add some variety thats all im saying.

Remember when Xbox was going to basically ban used games for the xbox one, and Playstation made fun of them with that video titled "how to share games on Playstation" and it was just one guy handing another a game disk? And now Playstation is getting rid of physical disks entirely

“it isnt something you have to read critically” well 😭

this technically is true but I think this also perfectly encapsulates why I am inherently distrustful of like. “”cozy”” “turn your brain off” fiction lmfao. like okay WHO gets to turn their brain off and who has to suffer through bigoted caricatures of themselves while everyone else is having cozy silly no brain time 😐

i think i'd be checking my phone in the cuck chair to be honest

All fantasy authors wish they had a bigger bathtub in their house. You can tell by every bathing scene ever written into a fantasy novel