your life is not an optimization problem

as in you'll never achieve the perfect daily routine, sleep schedule, coping mechanisms, mannerisms, fashion sense etc. even after years and years of healing and improvement and self-discovery. you will never be so good at life that you manage to utilize every waking moment. its great to be productive and all but sometimes you'll suck ass. sometimes you'll take eight hours to be done with a twenty minute job. you'll prioritize the wrong thing. you'll sleep for 12 hrs just to avoid being awake. you'll relapse. and you'll relapse again. you'll forget to turn in the assignment. you'll order too little food. life is far too large and complex for you to even experience it completely, much less try to make sense of and control it. you can't. please give up on that and be at peace with the hours you lose. they are not separate from your life.

we need to do something about superheros as a genre

I never liked those posts that reduce the Disney princesses to “girl who overacts about something and dramatically flings herself down and bawls” (super popular in the early 10’s and somehow that’s how a shocking majority view the classics now) but after an Aladdin (1992) rewatch, it’s especially egregious that they ever included Jasmine in that.

This part. This is the part I’m talking about

This is not a woman falling to pieces because her father won’t let her marry a man she just met.

This is a woman born to a life she has very little say in. She has never had a genuine friend (besides a tiger). She is facing a marriage to a man she doesn’t know and doesn’t like but duty (and the law) demands it. So she took a risk, ran away, ran to a world she doesn’t know or understand and when she landed in trouble (serious, serious trouble) a stranger came to her aid. She finally (finally!) made a real connection with someone but they didn’t get much time together before the guards showed up and she had to reveal who she was.

This moment when she’s crying her heart out? It comes after she’s been told that the first person she ever connected with, the first person to be genuinely interested in her for who she is and not what she is, the first real friend she has ever made, was executed… because of her.

She believes a good, innocent person has lost their life because of her actions, and what’s more, it brings home the reality for her that she cannot have a normal life or normal relationships, because see the consequences one little attempt wrought?

getting scambot messages from random accounts that clearly used to be normal active blogs is sad enough. you know that there used to be a real person on that blog until they were tricked into handing their password to the digital fae.

but it's an entirely new level of tragic when somebody you've actually spoken to gets turned into a bot account. it's like peeking at a zombie apocalypse through the window and realizing one of the shambling corpses was your friend.

and then the zombie catches sight of you, lurches up to your window, and shouts through the glass that they accidentally reported your account to tumblr and you'll be deactivated unless you click this link.

RIP to the blog that used to DM me to tell me they liked my new chapters. Their last known words spoken before being turned, 17 hours ago: "Ggs!" They were praising someone's deadlift.

the message they tried to get me with is probably the same message that got them, so for anybody who hasn't already been warned about the signs of a zombie account:

if you get something like this ↑ they're gonna follow up by instructing you to contact tumblr support on discord and give you contact info; or they're gonna link a website that looks sort of like tumblr support and say you have to email them; or any variety of "you must now contact tumblr, here is how you contact tumblr."

whatever they send you, it Does Not lead to tumblr. it leads to the master zombie that bit them and inducted them into the ranks of the undead, and will bite you the second they have your email and password. i might be confusing zombies and vampires. anyway,

it's easier to fall for these messages because the blog doesn't LOOK like a bot blog, because it ISN'T a bot blog. it's a normal person's blog that got accessed by a bot, meaning the blog's content CLEARLY looks like a real active user when you click on it. and yes—it might even be a blog you already know. sometimes bots like this go down a blog's DMs or reblogs and message people they've previously interacted with.

they got one of my treasured followers, and they can get you too. don't fall for their tricks. know the signs.

Tumblr support never asks you for your password except through the normal login page. Ever.

Basically no legitimate tech support service ever will, because it's incredibly unsafe to send passwords in plain text even disregarding the phishing threat. If someone asks for your password, NEVER give it to them. Treat it how you would treat your social security number or credit card details. Only enter it in verified, encrypted (https) pages like official login/auth dialogs with the correct domain name. Human tech support workers should never need plain text access to it.

guys i'm not feeling well (←person who has never felt well a day in their life)

this too shall pass is a great mantra for both small worries and huge life events but i fear i am “this too shall pass”-ing away my whole life

little girl acting drunk so you take its glass away from her and give it a sip and its just normal orange juice

it's just really apparent that people think it's okay to want pain but morally abhorrent to want to give it. sorry but the sadist gets to have fun too. it's actually pretty crucial to the process.

if I said I was going to a taekwondo class would you feel the need to tell me kicking people on the street is bad or.

Image ID: A screenshot of a tumblr comment that says "yeah, its only abhorrent imo, when the recipient is non consenting, i've" the screenshot cuts off.

'that blows' and 'that sucks' are both negative, which means moving air in any sort of way is inherently bad

we've all got that friend who's a little too ²

even though it's my job, i don't believe that the law or any kind of legal recognition has any kind of anything good for any of us.

i've spent years at this point working to hold the police department of a large US city accountable for it's terrorism of black communities and its murder of black people and any challenge any lawsuit any settlement agreement any reform is absorbed and reconfigured to ratchet up the violence the terrorism and the murder.

my (well founded) cynicism extends to legal recognition of transgender status and identity. legal recognition of identity in the US began basically with chattel slavery and evolved through reconstruction jim crow etc. the pseudoscience of race was reified and distance was placed between it and the legal protection of whiteness and white supremacy. the expectations of white people in white supremacy are deeply encoded in all our laws and protected and extended into the future. the expectations and comforts of white people depend on continued subjugation of everyone not white.

cisness works much the same (in large part because it is co-constitutive with whiteness). the legal recognition of cisness supports white supremacy and relies on the legal recognition of transness. there is not a world here that includes all of us. you can get close to using and enjoying the benefits of cisness, the benefits of whiteness, but it will always come at some expense. and included in that expense is everyone regarded as beneath you, more distant from cisness and whiteness, by the law.

seeking out legal recognition and protection of your transness puts you in a position where you depend on that legal distinction for the law's protection.

i just wonder if there is another way to do things.

just like. the law is not our friend.

the law is never our friend

I've always been really confused about the world culture of Fallout, especially before the collapse.

Like it's my understanding that the timeline diverges from our own after WW2, with the United States entering a golden atomic age driven by relentless xenophobic and expansionist conquest, plunging the world into a fascistic death spiral that lead to the resource wars and nuclear armageddon. And to deliver that bleak premise with a satirical edge, it's canonical that American culture is, at least by the 2070s when the world ends, stuck in a sort of neo 50s obsession where the only music and art that's popular enough to survive the nukes is all stuff that originated more than a century beforehand.

Like I get that the criticism being made is that a culture obsessed with its own past is indicative of a bleak present crushed by imperialism and nationalism, but can you really expect me to believe that Fallout's American empire was so bad that culture and art and aesthetics were just. Frozen in time for more than 100 years? Addicted to their own past? That the American people were so embroiled in reactionary ideologies that they were incapable of moving forward and creating anything new?

Anyway did you hear they're rebooting Malcolm in the Middle this year? And the Mummy. And the Devil Wears Prada. And Masters of the Universe. And Meet the Parents. And a 5th toy story movie. And a moana remake.

Could mean nothing.

I've never seen an AU where Chell and GLaDOS truly swap places and I think its mainly because if GLaDOS was a human she'd be a hot milf who is mean to you but if Chell was a computer she'd be like: