having a fursona is an extremely freeing and deeply personal method of self expression that everyone should at the very least consider, regardless of the stigma surrounding furries or lack of interest in the community. in this essay I wi
y’all in the tags want the essay so yknow what? I’ll give you the essay
having a fursona is a highly personal experience. No one can take a fursona away from you. I had characters that were dependent on stories I made in the past with abusive, terrible people, and those characters now bear the memories of those abusive, terrible people. but you know what my fursona is? my fursona is a representation of me. my poor experiences are my sona’s. as I overcome my trauma, I overcome trauma associated with my fursona.
no one can ruin him for me. no one can take him away. when I’m upset, I can manipulate him into what I want. I can make him punk. I can put him in the clothes I can’t afford. I can put him in the fashion I’ll never wear. I can either draw him like my body type and help myself cope with dysphoria, or I can draw him in the body type I eventually want to have. I can draw him with other people and other characters.
and the animal aspect is representative too. I know people who are slow and tired who make sloth sonas. people who feel like they’re dirty who make raccoon sonas. people who want to strive for knowledge and make owl sonas. it’s a representation of who you are and who you want to be. your fursona is your ideal you. they’re a coping mechanism and a goal all at once.
your fursona is a unique experience no one can destroy. no one can take your fursona from you. no one can truly destroy your identity as long as you OWN THAT SHIT. therefore: make a fursona
Tag: i mean
pure:
pure:
Yeah it’s cool to pretend you hate this site despite logging in via oxygen mask every day like a coward but I’m gonna miss this site when it tanks. Never have I interacted with a piece of media that is this entertaining and outrageous. It’s historical.
Tumblr’s polarity is truly only outmatched by Twitter to me. There are amazing and creative people here and then there are demons and scoundrels and the insane amount of micro-societies created by both would make any sociologist have a field day. You are always two degrees of separation away from mind-blowing confusion if you click any link on your dashboard. The constant stimulation…is terrifying.
Why study for exams when you can deduce the answers based on context clues from other questions and then use those answers to provide you with even more context clues for even more questions in an hour-long stress-fueled Professor Layton-esque logic puzzle extravaganza of future-hinging doom.
Believe it or not, if you want to do well in academia, this particular skill set is at least as important as knowing how to study properly.
Acing an exam doesn’t require filling in answers that are, in some abstract sense, “correct”; it requires filling in what whoever authored the exam thinks the correct answers are. Often the two have very little to do with one another!
Working up a mental profile of the exam’s author based on the wording and arrangement of the questions and going “okay, if I was the joker who wrote this thing, what would I expect the correct answer to be?” is a totally legitimate exam-writing skill, and arguably more critical than actually knowing the material.
The older I get, the more I think about
the early years of Tom Riddle aka. Voldemort. Now that I’m in my mid-twenties,
I find it hard to believe that an eleven-year-old child could be irredeemably
evil. I know that children can be cruel or callous, and they are capable of
causing other children harm, even severe, irreparable harm. But writing a
pre-teen off as evil, instead of giving him the adequate resources to learn how
not to be evil, that is just irresponsible, and I don’t know if this is an
in-story mistake on Dumbledore’s part, or a writing mistake on JKR’s part.Anyway, little Tom Riddle was fucked up
and amoral but not necessarily evil, and he became evil in his teenage years,
during his Hogwarts education. He opened the Chamber of Secrets and committed
his first murder at the age of sixteen. (When I read the book at the age of
nine, he seemed like a grown-up, now he strikes me as incredibly young.)I was thinking about things that could
have turned him back around, that could have shown him another path, taught him
the value of ‘house-elves and children’s tales, love, loyalty and innocence.’
And an image came to me, an image so sharp and beautiful that I know for
certain that I will never be able to do it justice.All that it would take is a minor
coincidence, a small flaw in the plan: he tries to frame Hagrid for opening the
chamber, but he waits too long, and Hagrid has already gotten rid of Aragog,
smuggled him safely into the forest. So Tom improvises: he lures Hagrid down to
the chamber with rumours of a magnificent beast, and plans to leave him there
to be stared to death. He’s already forged a sheaf of stupid notes with the stupid
oaf’s stupid handwriting that will tell everyone that Hagrid was the one
terrorising the school until he lost control of the basilisk. (Of course this
change of plans means that the chamber will be discovered and there’s a good
chance the serpent will be killed. A pity, but not a catastrophe: he loses a
useful stronghold and a weapon, but the serpent might kill some people before
it’s brought down, and the discovery of the Chamber will strike fear into the
hearts of the Mudbloods. Not a bad outcome.)So he leaves the chamber, drops a few
hints to the overgrown idiot, (pretending to befriend him was pathetically
easy), and follows Hagrid down the chute with a few minutes of delay.He expects to find a dead body and a
bored basilisk. What he finds instead is this: the basilisk rearing up to the
height of fifteen feet, with the oaf standing right in front of him, not
running, not moving, with both his arms held up. His eyes are shut tight – he
must be smarter than Riddle thought he was – and he’s talking. It’s not
Parseltongue, it’s just plain English with a thick Yorkshire accent, saying
things like ‘look at you, little darling, what a wonder you are, what a beauty,
won’t you come down here, sweetheart’? The basilisk coils and shifts, it sways
its head from side to side, then bends its enormous head downwards. Riddle is
certain that it is going to strike, that it will sink its venomous fangs into
that stupid, trusting oaf. But the basilisk bends down, bends even lower, and
butts its nose into Hagrid’s hands. The oaf keeps talking, murmurs ‘that’s right,
sweetheart, you’re a good girl’ as his oversized hands pat the scaly snout, the
huffing nostrils… the closed eyelids. Hagrid opens his eyes, and gets to look
the basilisk directly in the face before it swings around, slithers away and
coils up in the other corner of the chamber.Hagrid laughs, too loud, too high, a
little hysterical, and by now Riddle sees that he’s shaking, his legs are so
unsteady that he can hardly stand. Glancing around, he spots Riddle, hiding too
carelessly in the doorway, and beckons him over.‘You were right.’ He says breathlessly.
‘This place is amazing!’And that is the moment Riddle realises
there are lots of powerful things in the world he did not yet know about. If he
wants power, real power, he needs to learn more, and it starts with this boy,
this oversized, shabbily dressed boy with his stupid snakecharmer’s grin.#i was an evil motherfucker at eleven#a lot of us were#you outgrow it#unless you get locked into it#hogwarts locked tom into it#but that’s the human tragedy#personally i think it’s good writing#because it’s depicting something that really happens to people#albeit with less basilisks usually
in america this is the school-to-prison pipeline basically
anyone else still sometimes catch themselves thinking about how after all those years of idolizing dave strider and after all that time in the void session wondering and anticipating and nervously awaiting this theoretical possibility that he might get the chance to meet him, dirk finally fucking sits down with dave one on one hours from the final battle and like wow fucking surprise motherfucker
he gets to find out his literal worst fears were ACTUALLY true! the version of him that dave knew actually did, in fact, do his level best to ruin dave’s life and was an abusive, toxic influence from day one and throughout to the point where dave can’t even look at him without flinching!
this coming at a time when dirk is already horrendously low on himself, his relationship with Jake literally just blew up like 3 hours ago and if the AR thing went down even remotely the same way there was also that and holy hell dude what a time to be informed about the existence of Bro Strider. Dirk is sitting there thinking he was a toxic influence to Jake from moment one and probably all of his friends the whole time and here Dave is confirming everything from a parallel perspective?
you can just see this horrible gut clenching moment when this utterly defeated Dirk just meekly accepts that this other version of himself is reflective of his true innermost self and has justifiably ruined any chance he ever had of impressing or even knowing Dave
– and then you see Dave just immediately lift it off him, even get kinda angry at him for having the audacity to even try accepting it that way, you can FEEL Dave’s fucking confusion because he went in guns blazing expecting a confrontation with someone as impossible and inscrutable as Bro was. Dave went in expecting to punch a brick wall and get nowhere, and instead he got Dirk “you’re absolutely right and I’m so fucking sorry I ruined your life” Strider
and from Dirk’s pov, listening to this, watching this, having this realization that this dave isn’t an untouchable, aloof, mysterious and mythical heroic figure of legend at all, but that only makes him MORE worthy of idolization in all the ways that genuinely matter – and simultaneously thinking that he’s already sabotaged himself out of the chance to know him at all.
It’s like, god, you know those hyperrealistic nightmares people have sometimes that are so fucking scary because they’re indistinguishable from real life, the ones where after you wake up it takes a long time for the understanding that it was actually just a dream to hit you and then you want to cry with relief?
For Dirk this had to have been so much like that, the whiplash between being 100% sure that Dave was just going to say what he needed to say and then never speak to him again (and knowing Dirk would have considered it completely justified and never questioned his right to do so jesus christ) followed IMMEDIATELY by Dave just being like no you don’t get it, THIS you, this version of you, what I am looking for deep down in my fucking SOUL is for this you that you are right now to be a person that I can have in my life to tell me that I’m okay, that you’re okay, that WE’RE okay – and after fifteen minutes talking to you I can already immediately tell that you ARE that person.
Dirk’s friends were always only interested in denying the possibility that Dirk could ever truly become a monster, they could never have possibly understood just how DARK Dirk is at his most self destructive, and that’s part of why their reassurances were always hollow for him – they didn’t GET IT, right, they never could have followed the rabbit hole all the way down, so what did they know? But this guy, Dave Strider, has literally seen Dirk at his worst, has lived through the actual reality of the worst things living inside the full-picture potential of Dirk Strider, has dealt with that to great personal detriment and is fucking STILL sitting here telling him “I can tell that you are different, I can tell that you are better, and I am willing to trust you and help you to become a better person than the guy I knew because at the end of the fucking day, you are too important to me to give up on”
like yeah confronting dirk with all of that was what dave needed absolutely but BEING confronted and ultimately forgiven by dave was what dirk needed too, just as much
in conclusion homestuck is good
both of them grew up looking for a brother and they found each other at last
i sniffled, i’m not ashamed
just moving along like everyone else 