Mostly Void.

being disabled and unemployed isn't contributing to society but joining the military is? going abroad to brutalise people for imperial interests is?? maybe that society isn't worth anything

I feel like when I say ‘relatable’ what I really mean is ‘resonant.’ I don’t want characters who I feel are like me, I want characters who have emotions so strong I can feel them through the page.

I think this is important because a lot of us forget the power of stories to make us feel things about characters who are not like us, who have experienced things that we never will. The purpose of listening to someone else's story should not necessarily be identification, but understanding.

You know, there's this cliché that teenage boys always eat massive amounts, but teenage girls really aren't that different if they're not suppressed by diet culture and body shaming. Like, I was a teenage girl who frankly just stopped bothering to fit into mainstream beauty ideals at some point, and I would regularly make myself just one big massive pot of pasta and devour it completely. This wasn't even stress eating or anything, I just genuinely needed the energy because you know, I was a teenager and my body was developing. I feel like so many teenage girls think they need to eat as little as possible to be petite and pretty, but the truth is that your body is developing just as intensely as teenage boys' bodies. Eat more, please, your body needs it.

All teenagers desire to devour an entire pot of pasta

A Labour MP and Cabinet Minister reported one of their constituents to the police for emailing them about Gaza, which led to their arrest in a dawn raid. In Britain, the classic liberal advice ('write to your representative!') means having PC Shit Beard and his sex offender friends ramming your front door down.

Imagine all the things I could do if I just did them.

i was talking about this on my server earlier but i really think "cozy" is one of the worst genre labels out there in the gaming space. like people dunk on the terms "metroidvania" and "first person shooter" a lot for being uncreative or limiting but at least those are like... falsifiable descriptors. you can look at a game and go "yeah this game's mechanics and core gameplay loop generally operate like metroid/castlevania" or "yeah this game primarily uses a first person camera paired with some sort of projectile weapon" so i don't think they're completely useless. but "cozy" is just nonsense. fully subjective. i see a lot of games popularly labeled as "cozy" that share almost zero mechanical features between them and don't even always match in tone or aesthetic. hearing a game described as "cozy" doesn't tell you anything about what to expect as a player beyond maybe giving you a sort of forewarning about the fanbase and their discomfort tolerance. "cozy" is not a quantifiable metric. like imagine if someone offered to buy you takeout and asked you what kind of food you'd like and you told them fully unironically, and with no further elaboration, "i want to get yummy food." that's what hearing "cozy games" sounds like to me

image: tags. #most of them aren't even cozy they're just marketable. end ID.

sorry but demanding strong opening lines is forced idc idc. "you need to HOOK the reader with the first line otherwise they wont keep reading" idk as a normal person who is naturally curious, its the premise that gets me to consider reading a book. i dont fully form my opinion of a book until 1/3 of the way through at least. hello? yall dont like to read.

out of all of the amazing books that ive read, i remember exactly one (1) opening line, and it wasnt the opening line itself, it was the general vibe of the first page, and THAT was because id just finished a book that was bland as shit and i was happy to see prose again. and that book? ended up being mid as hell too LAKJSHKLDFJHASKLJF

okay you got a good hook. is the story good or are you just opening a performance with fireworks?

i think i don't really vibe with most other fans of my favorite male characters is because they usually depict them too much of a man, and i am not interested in men, i am interested in The Character. and i am not saying that they should depict them as women, or nonbinary, or should depict them as feminine, no, not at all. but there's like, you know, you can depict a male character as The Character, and you can depict them as The Man. do you get me? like, i go to the fandom looking for art and fics, and it's just, regardless of his actual characterization, it's all just fantasizing about some kind of an abstract dominant patriarch, wearing my favorite character's face. it may be the most totally-wouldnt-have-normal-relationships (and sometimes even would-literally-abuse-you) kind of guy, and you join a dedicated space for his fans, and all they talk about is how they want to marry and start a tradcore 50s style nuclear family with him. it can be a guy who's arrogance and attempts of domination are explicitly shown to be a facade that hide the fact that he's actually kind of a massive pathetic wet loser, and you go to his fics, and they're all depicting him as a caricaturish daddy dom. at this point it's like, do you even like the character at all, or do you just like The Man, and project this man onto whatever character you find visually attractive? and these people kind of, really really poison actual discussion of the character, who is kind of a fucked up evil person (i only like *those* types, so im talking about them) because they see analysis of the actual character as an attack on their fantasized daddy dom husband, who is actually isn't The Character at all, and is simply a face of the day for The Man

the place I work at remodeled these split gendered restrooms into “inclusive restrooms” and never told us what they meant while construction was ongoing. I need you to know every atom of potential criticism or whining that could’ve happened disappeared when people found out this meant we got 10 fully separate private bathrooms with sinks inside. I’ve not heard a single person crack a joke about the inclusive signage. this is the world TERFs are trying to steal from you

I have a friend who was strongly against inclusive bathrooms because he felt that “bathroom stalls are already really exposed due to how they’re constructed, so no wonder women don’t want men in the same bathrooms as them” and when I pointed out that we could just… build better bathrooms… with less exposed stalls, he got really quiet and then said “honestly that sounds so much better, but there must be some problem with building them like that, because otherwise wouldn’t we already be doing it?” BESTIE we are. WE ARE. Old-style bathrooms are cheaply made, poorly designed, and all around bad. Haven’t you noticed that men’s restrooms rooms get weirdly sticky? Haven’t you noticed that women’s restrooms end up with giant lines? This is because these rooms are architecturally awful. And we can do better now, because we know more! And we are!!! People are actively designing better bathrooms that address known problems, and guess what: those bathrooms are “inclusive” in the same way that curb-cuts are inclusive. It doesn’t matter if the ramp was built for a wheelchair or a stroller; it doesn’t matter if the bathrooms were designed specifically for gender inclusivity or just because fall-apart-if-you-sneeze-on-them metal stall dividers with giant ass peek gaps suck. We can in fact improve our built environment to better meet our needs. Stop cutting off your nose to spite your face; stop settling for less just because someone else might also enjoy it.

Seattle's SEA-TAC airport has an all gender restroom that's a row of about a dozen fully enclosed separated little rooms that lock, with a shared bank of sinks and it's great. Love it. Lot of very strange encounters at the sinks, feels odd the first few times! But people laugh it off almost instantly. Because it's not actually a big deal to share a sink.

You really start to understand that the “angry black woman” and “mean lesbian” stereotype only exists to shame us for the fact we get reasonably upset about people wanting to horrifically abuse us indiscriminately. Let’s get meaner !

teenagers aren’t the vanguards of the pro-censorship movement. the closest thing that happens to this is that bad actors who are adults exploit teenagers’ age-appropriate discomfort with violent and sexual art to incite internet stochastic terrorism campaigns. but even this happens far less often than adults just silencing children and pretending to be speaking for them by proxy.

[ID from alt: A traditional gouache painting depicting Laguna Beach at sunset. Many palm trees are prominently featured in shadow. End ID]