the bookish wallflower

there's this weird thing people fall into online a lot, where people assume that if the [perceived-to-be-inferior] version of [activity] is discouraged then people will, naturally, do [perceived-to-be-superior] version of [activity] instead. When really it's just as (or more) likely that if [perceived-to-be-inferior] version of [activity] is discouraged people just won't do it at all.

audiobook listeners are not necessarily people who would otherwise do a lot of traditional reading if audiobooks did not exist, many are people who simply would experience zero books. Booktok romance readers would not necessarily be reading the classics if booktok did not exist, many of them would simply not read. Fanfiction writers would not necessarily be novelists if fanfic wasn't an option, many would just be people who didn't write. You know?

I love that opera sits in this limbo where it's extremely well-known but not really beyond a surface level recognition, so you get commercials for makeup or whatever to the tune of the I Hate Women So Much It's Unreal aria

Sorry we really went from free the nipple, take back the night, slut walks, and ending gender/sex segregation in sports being fucking milquetoast feminism 101 concepts to fucking girl dinner and "I just worry about fairness if we let trans girls play against cis ones" and "it was right of that woman to call the cops on a black man for existing near here in public during the day time because men are all violent monsters" and "radical feminism isn't transphobic we just need to kill all men including trans ones those oppressive traitors" and I will legit never be able to be normal about it. What the FUCK happened. I'd say I wonder what the feminists of my youth would say about this but I'm one and lemme tell ya I want to throw up. Go fucking read bell hooks or do something else useful please because all of this learned helplessness, gender essentialism, and transphobia dressed up as feminism is actively holding us back.

Pulitzer Prize type shit

Why's this dude built like crash bandicoot

Everything about this damn post is so funny to me. The lighting of the arm from the flash. The posing of the arm like a dramatic death from a novella. The fact the photo somehow got taken still and looks this good. The subreddit name. The fact this guy really is built like crash bandicoot

The fact that the Pulitzer Prize is for writing, not photography

WAIT HOLD ON I cannot fucking believe when I was like four years old my parents were cajoling me to walk with the family and trying to get me to keep up even though I kept insisting that I was "tired" until they took me to a doctor and found out my LUNGS DIDN'T WORK. how insane that we live in a world where reasonably loving parents think their FOUR YEAR OLD is trying to be LAZY. like they were mortified to be clear. adults are just so trained to ignore children's complaints as untrustworthy, kids just need discipline, they can't possibly speak for themselves. what the fuuuuck.

YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE BTW you should always be trying to take children seriously, especially very little ones but definitely all of them. the most disempowered class basically legally defined as property and most people are like "yeah that's good actually I hate when they Loiter lol they're stupid and loud and i actually think children should stop existing. restrict their personhood more actually"

this is what the other side of trying to do it right looks like btw. my post emphasizes giving a damn and listening to kids at all, and all the horror stories in the notes illustrate how lacking that was for them. but when we adults try to meet their needs as best we can, it still doesn't go perfectly. however, I think in the end this child will grow up knowing his parents tried their best and listened closely and chased answers while being sensitive to his pain. disability and health challenges exist regardless, and love alone won't solve those problems, but it will create children who become adults that can trust that the world is worth living in, that their suffering is real and deserves correcting, that they have a voice that matters. ultimately, that's what we needed and what they will need.

The vibe I get with the Marco Rubio crowd astroturfing South America with right wing politics following the deinvestment of usaid is like good cop bad cop energy no shade. This new era of imperialism everyone just pretends isn’t happening. China in Brazil under the guise of aerospace programs, in response us in Argentina under the guise of joint infrastructure plans, all while doing damage control for its usaid election interference plans by …just doing election interference in the opposite direction.

my problem is i think every character concept can be improved by making them a little nonbinary. this has created a comically unrealistic concentration of People With A Weird Gender Thing Going On in my stories and i will not be stopping any time soon. im genders georg.

holy shit have you evver tried this new substance called album in order

The other day my wife told me about this influencer who said she needed to go on ozempic so she could go from 130 lbs down to 115 and I really cannot stress the degree to which we have so COMPLETELY lost the plot with this glp1 shit. Like not only are people are going on this shit for purely cosmetic purposes, the cosmetic purposes are delusional. This is the kind of mindset that gives people eating disorders but now because you can get a prescription instead of having to starve yourself or enduce vomiting a big swath of the general public seems eager to go along with it. Body Positivity did not go fucking far enough because I am being so real when I say that fatphobia is more of a public health crisis than obesity has ever been

I just realized there a lot of dead moms in PJO/HOO.

Look, everyone in HoO has their thing. Leo's thing is that he can build stuff. Jason’s thing is that he can fly. Percy's thing is that he's already had 5 books of character development so his mom doesn't need to be dead in order for him to be sympathetic.