"A marriage ending isn't a failure at all. I spent eleven years with her. We were so in love that we couldn't image life apart from each other. We got our own place, adopted a dog, and supported each other through school. I thought if tow people loved each other enough the rest would fall into place, except... love isn't everything.

And I didn't want to believe that, but we were sitting in counseling one day, talking about our future and I realized we were describing two completely different lives. Where we'd live, what kind of life we wanted, what made us happy. And it hit me that- I love this woman and this woman loved me. And after eleven years of loss, grief, career changes, we were so deeply in love... but we weren't aligned. And I kept thinking 'We just need to try harder. We can find some compromise to make this work,' because that's what you're supposed to do when you love someone, right?

But the reality was, we had just become different people. Her trade school took her in one direction, my graduate degree in another and trying to force us back into who we were five years ago wasn't coming from a place of love. It was coming from a place of fear. Fear that, if this ended, it meant we wasted eleven years. But sitting there across from her, I realized: That's not how love works.

Those eleven years happened. They were real. The dog, our home, showing up for each other through grad school and trade school. I wouldn't change a single thing because loving someone doesn't mean you're meant to stay with them forever. And letting go doesn't erase what you had. We measure marriage by whether it lasts forever or not, but what if we measured it by whether it mattered?

What if we measured it by the love we gave, the life we built, and the people we became? Because love's job isn't to last forever, it's to help you become fully completely yourself, and sometimes the most loving thing you can do is give each other permission to be yourselves, separately. But the dog doesn't know were' divorced. He just gets two Christmases now."

Pulled this from this guy Preston Rakovsky's Instagram (@prestonrack) because it is a beautiful perspective on love, marriage, and relationships in general.

Just in case you need to hear this, bedtime is not for looking at news. It's not time to watch videos about what's going on; it's not time to catch up or "stay informed". Your job at bedtime is to relax and clear your head and sleep, so that you can be rested and tackle another day tomorrow. That's your only responsibility at bedtime. That's how you serve the world best. At bedtime, relaxing and going the fuck to sleep is praxis.

MAGA boomers SHOCKED by 20y/o commie speaking fluent hog

Hog 201 for anyone interested in trying this:

Bodily autonomy (like abortion, anti draft, etc) -> “The government shouldn’t be able to force anything on my body I don’t want.”

Anti surveillance -> “I don’t trust big government/big tech (big brother if you’re feeling frisky) with the ability to spy on me and my family.”

Immigration -> “Next to all of us immigrated at some point, I don’t see why the elites get to decide who’s allowed to be where. What’s to stop them coming for me?”

Climate Change -> “Big oil shouldn’t get to determine whether or not I get to go places. I don’t want to be dependent on some big business to survive.”

State Violence -> “I don’t want the goddamn secret police breathing down my neck! I trust my community a whole hell of a lot more to help me than I do the state!”

The vast majority of conservatives think of themselves as underdogs being repressed by the government/the elite, and they value personal freedom (specifically their personal freedom, they don’t care about other people). The will almost always agree with leftist points if you can find a way to blame the problem on their vague enemies (useful, since rich people are the root of most problems), and tie it back to their ability to say fuck everyone else. NEVER appeal to science, theory, logic, or human goodness. Make it seem as if you are a paranoid lunatic who trusts no one. They love it.

#you need to tailor your arguments to people's existing values and priorities if you want to convince them #the flip side is that it's every bit as easy to tailor conservative arguments to convince a leftist audience #so don't get smug #you're not immune to this either <- prev extremely true

ALIEN 1979 | dir. Ridley Scott

This is why you see so many many many "we can't vote our way out of this" posts online. They know that sentiment will depress turnout. Turnout that will get the people paying them kicked out of power.

Vote

Hungarian voters were smart on an individual level, throwing their support behind Magyar over how they might have traditionally voted, but there was an institutional element to it as well: it took most of the other parties dropping out of contention in order to clear the decks and avoid vote-splitting, which was a brave and principled thing for them to do.

To put this in American terms: They teamed up to elect Mitt Romney to defeat Donald Trump, something our left would never do.

Me trying to say something to my partner about some cool fanart I just saw on my dash.

Him: back up back up, what the FUCK is Mouse Effect.

Lizardsex I love you...

The burning question of course is whether everyone is mice, or just the humans. Like are the salarians little frogs or is it Mice and Mice With Blue Tentacles???

sorry im absolutely too floored by the fact you just called me 'lizardsex' to give you an answer

... I see now your name is probably Lizards Exposed and not in fact Lizard Sex Posed.

This exact phenomenon is why there’s now a hyphen in my url.

Is it really a Vorkosigan Saga book if Miles doesn't get sat down at the end and asked, "What the actual fuck were you thinking?" To which he responds, "Yeah, my bad" and proceeds to receive a motherfucking PROMOTION

"Promotion? Promotion?!"

Miles threw the hand terminal down on the desk and swore. "Does Tumblr know how long I wore those red tabs?"

Ivan half-swallowed his bite of jam tart. "But when you traded up, you really traded up, Lord Auditor Coz. 'Sides, you got the blue ones in the bargain as I recall."

"Retroactively." Miles slumped back into the chair. "Retired. I was never an active-duty captain, Ivan."

Miles blew out his breath, ran his fingers back through his hair. "Eight years. Eight years a lieutenant on active duty. Looks like I was a real screw-up, y'know? Eight years of my blood and--"

"'--bone, with no promotion in sight,'" Ivan caroled, waving the remainder of his tart in the air as if conducting an orchestra. "Just is that all, Lieutenant Vorkosigan, and what have you done lately, Lieutenant Vor-- awk!"

Ivan's own recitation of the familiar complaint was interrupted by Miles' thrown pillow.

"I take your point," Miles said thinly. "I suppose I ought to let that go."

"You really ought," agreed Ivan.

Miles gestured to the hand terminal and, by association, the loathsome Tumblr within. "I don't suppose your crowd discusses such things there? D'you think you might set the discourse straight...?"

Ivan's eyes narrowed. "First off, do I look like ImpMil's Propaganda Corps, and two, just what do you mean by my crowd? I style myself a man of leisure, but I do have standards."

"You wangled yourself a diplomatic posting to a pleasure planet," Miles replied genially.

"Thus demonstrating both my impeccable good taste and my work ethic, neither of which imply that my crowd would have anything to do with Tumblr! Let it go, Coz." Ivan folded the last of the tart into his mouth.

Miles drummed his fingers over the surface of the quiescent hand terminal.

"I hate to say it, but you're right. There are more important things than Tumblr." He eyed Ivan's attempt to imitate a python swallowing its prey whole. "Is that a Ma Kosti tart?"

"Mrmfl," Ivan confirmed.

"Are there more?"

"Glrmph. She was putting a second tray in when I came up. Prob'ly done any minute."

Miles stood up. "Definitely more important things than Tumblr."

Still the best gaming fact.

Noted: misogyny is a skill issue

Daniel Sloss SAID IT THANK YOU DANIEL SLOSS

Reblogging again now that Russell Brand's ugly mug is back in the news to remind everyone that in the 2023 Times expose on his abusive behaviour, Daniel Sloss was the only male comedian willing to be named and quoted like "yeah that dude's a scumbag and women have been warning each other about him for years."

Yes it's okay for characters to stay single. It's also okay to suddenly reveal the entire pirate crew is made up of men with noble blood so they'll be suitable matches for the Major Generals daughters. We need a variety of stories in the world.

the problem with tumblr spells is all of you lil sluts are casting and not giving it time to charge so you're all casting cantrips and not 9th level death spells. everyone wants to be the one to take them down no one wants to be the one who assists

we're going to try again witha little but minimal casting

IT will happen in August of 2026. like to charge and reblog to cast but cast sparingly

Wait stop. everyone +like now and spread it a little but cast on the same day in August. lets try August 6th or something.

Hope it's okay to share some quotes from the transcription of this interview:

And:

And:

it’s nice seeing other people starting to open their eyes to what i’ve been saying for a while in that the current use and proliferation of the term “gooning” is an outright tool of fascism

the second “gooning” stopped referring to a specific sexual practice and started to be used as a replacement for “masturbation” we needed to kill it immediately and sadly we didn’t

if you call someone a “masturbator” in a derisive way you sound like a fucking mormon but suddenly you switch to calling them a “gooner” and you’ve created a way to express the same puritanical beliefs around masturbation that is not only palatable to the average person but the attached underlying implications of the term make people way more susceptible to adopting those beliefs themselves

leftists need to fucking stop using the term “gooner” right fucking now

demonizing human sexuality and treating masturbation and sexual activity as deviant and disgusting are straight up fascist tools and it’s startling how successful this aspect of it has been the last few years

Reblogging for knowledge of yet another dog whistle

ok i’ve been curious about something. can you name a character who is, all three at once,

1. canonically female (no variation)

2. canonically the protagonist of her story (if it’s an ensemble cast you have to say you can legitimately see her as The main character)

3. your personal #1 favorite character in that story (ties are acceptable)

— Philip K. Dick

Maybe I'm just overly sensitive, but it genuinely upsets me when I see people who hate zutara dismiss it by claiming that it's a ship "mainly liked by little girls," for a variety of reasons:

1. What's wrong with something having a largely female audience? Criticize whatever you want, but don't act like the gender or age of a fanbase is a legitimate critique. If something is "bad," it's because of its own flaws, not because girls like it

2. The young girls who shipped zutara when Avatar was airing are now adults. They grew up, gained life experience, developed their understanding of storytelling, and revisited the show with more mature eyes. And guess what? Many of them still love zutara. If the ship really was just childish, girly nonsense, its staying power wouldn't be this strong. You can dislike the ship, but acting as if it's a childhood phase is just wrong at this point

3. The stereotype that women ship zutara only because they're attracted to Zuko is reductive and false. In my experience, most women who enjoy zutara love it because of Katara. They love her character and want to see her be unconditionally valued, supported, and understood

People are free to dislike zutara for their own reasons, but dismissing it through sexist stereotypes and assumptions about its fanbase is just insulting

This argument is so meta, too, because like, if these people despise young girls and what they like so much, what does this say about how they view Katara?

I mean, the way these people expect that zutara is something girls should grow out of mirrors the expectation that Katara should grow to love Aang because he wants her to.

It's misogyny and nothing but misogyny.

I had a point with this and then it got super long and super lost whoops lol. I just watched the show for the first time and it's been a bummer how people constantly dismiss Zutara as something you'd only see because you're hot for enemies to lovers (their way of implying it's shallow and illegitimate)... but the whole reason I like it is because it's such a sweet friendship built on earned trust and mutual emotional understanding. It honestly feels like I watched a different show than everyone else because I thought it was so clear in all the writing/framing.

It specifically drives me so crazy seeing people dismiss it as a misogynistic bad boy trope

Which in itself is misogynistic and reductive: "women only like it cause it's hot" or w/e rather than like... all the specific intimate scenes they get together seeing a reflection of themself in the other... and being there for each other during super personal moments/life events that no one else saw. But yeah, make it shallow and weird??

It also negates all of the complexity of Katara's character and Zuko's arc.

Like whoever thinks she just Hates Him (and therefore the ship Must be something shallow) either didn't watch the show, doesn't understand her character, or doesn't think Zuko was actually redeemed. All of this shows that he prioritizes her as a person, not seeing some idealized version of her but showing up for her in the way she needs and expresses even when it's ugly. What is misogynistic about someone... deeply respecting her and her feelings? It's so backwards!

MEANWHILE the same people will be ride or die for the Nice Guy propaganda ship, which supports the antiquated notion that solely because someone is nice, likes her, and has been her friend for a while that it would be a good relationship, conveniently ignoring the fact that

One sided vs reciprocal.

And it's fine if you wanna ship it and headcanon something else- but if you're gonna die on the hill of canon to deny Zutara, then the flaws of the others in canon are fair game, too!

BUT I guess it makes sense that people who don't see the importance in someone respecting your choice and autonomy (the crux of the Zuko/Katara ship) would prefer having Katara be with someone she actively turned down of her own autonomy before they shoehorned in that end scene in complete incongruence with how her character was portrayed throughout the rest of the show.

When the CEO of the company that didn't turn away Nazi business says "this isn't going to work" you know it's bad.

i suggest getting prepared