you know what? fuck it, man. the world is held in the fists of people who like to break things. at this point i’m saying who gives a shit. wear that victorian dress you don’t have an excuse for. dress up like a witch, pointed hat and all. who cares anymore. why worry about it when there’s bigger stuff to worry on. i’m saying. yeah, this lipstick is too dark, wanna share? i’m saying go talk to her, tell her that you like her hair. i’m saying she’s out of my league but i’m still swinging, i’m saying yeah i’m in a ballgown and it’s a pta meeting. what about it. eat the extra brownie, tell her your feelings. i’m saying if nothing matters than we might as well give nothing meaning.
This is so inspiring
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Suffering is a terrible fire; it either purifies or destroys.
Oscar Wilde from a letter to Mrs Bernard Beere, circa 22 May 1897. (via xshayarsha)
Pre-internet era: You walk into a room and sit down at a table. Someone brings you a turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a soda. Perhaps you are a vegetarian, or gluten-free. Doesn’t matter; you get a turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a soda.
Usenet era: You walk into a room and sit down to your turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a soda. Someone tells you that over at the University they are also serving BLTs, pizza, coffee, and beer.
Web 1.0 (aka The Great Schism): You walk into a room. The room is lined with 50 unmarked doors. Someone tells you, “We have enough food to feed you and a hundred more…but we’ve scattered it behind these fifty doors. Good luck!”
Web 2.0 (present): You walk into a room. Someone points at the buffet and says, “Enjoy!” You turn to see a 100-foot-long buffet table, piled high with every kind of food imaginable. To be fair, some of the food is durian, head cheese, and chilled monkey brains, but that’s cool, some people are into those…and trust me, they are even more psyched to be here than you are.
Tumblr (a hell pit): You try to serve yourself a baked potato. An angry child runs up and slaps the plate out of your hand. “NIGHTSHADE PLANTS ARE POISONOUS,” the child yells. You are hungry. The child gives you a turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a kick on the shin.
The fact that a potato is replaced with a different form of potato is what makes that last one so accurate.
The densest people on the internet are the ones who say sci fi and fantasy are getting too political. Why can’t we go back to the good old days of The Twilight Zone, with its various episodes about mob mentality and the danger of mass paranoia that totally weren’t about the Red Scare. Or Star Wars and its genocidal empire of racially homogeneous Aryan men. Or Dune with its religious tribal peoples who live in a desert that contains the galaxy’s most valuable resource and the wars with the foreign colonizers, that was purely from Frank Herbert’s imagination. Can you imagine how much Star Trek would suck if it was packed to the brim with ham-fisted allegories of every societal issue of the 20th century. Not like all this modern ultra-political stuff, like a woman hero.
‘Some there are among us who sing that the Shadow will draw back and peace shall come again. Yet I do not believe that the world about us will ever again be as it was of old, or the light of the Sun as it was aforetime.’
if exploring your gender is ‘becoming a trend’ then i’m glad it’s replacing the ‘being confused and miserable with no context or vocabulary for what you’re going through’ trend
there is honestly zero things wrong with people exploring their gender
Exploring your gender leads to either discovering a gender identity you feel more comfortable with than the one you were assigned at birth or realizing you identify best with your assigned gender except now you have a better understanding/awareness of trans, genderfluid, and nonbinary people and can begin to break down the toxic, transphobic bullshit you have most likely heard or seen at some point in your life 🙂
Here’s a cool trick to see if a man actually respects you: try disagreeing with him
A friend of mine did something with online dating where, before meeting a person, she’d say no to something minor without a reason for the no. For example: “No, I don’t want to meet at a coffee shop, how about X?”, or “No, not Wednesday”, or “No, I don’t want to recognize each other by both wearing green shirts”. She said how the potential dates reacted was a huge indicator of whether she actually wanted to meet them, something I readily believe.
I’ve mentioned this to a few people and sometimes I get very annoyed and incredulous responses from guys about how are they supposed to know that it’s a test if the girl is being unreasonable? How are they supposed to know that and let her have her way? I find it difficult to explain that if you find it unreasonable for someone to have a preference of no consequence which they don’t feel the need to explain, then you are the one being unreasonable. You can decide for yourself that it sounds flaky and you don’t want to date her, but you don’t have a right to know and approve all of her reasons for things in order to deign to respect that she said no about it. Especially in the case of someone you haven’t even fucking met yet.
The point isn’t to know it’s a test, the point is that if you would only say “yes” if you knew it was a test, then what if it’s not a test, but because she hates coffee shops, or because she’s attending a funeral Wednesday and doesn’t know you well enough to want to share that, or whatever else? Because if you’re making rules for when other people can have preferences and not explain why… yeah, that is a thing they can reasonably want to avoid.
a while back i mentioned this very method as a way of testing a new friendship, and got some pushback from all genders. toxic people exist in every category, and their response to an unexplained refusal will out them every time.
i mean, i’m sure some of those objecting were simply idealists who found the notion of testing a new friend unpleasant. but mostly it was the “but what if it’s unreasonable” objection. my dudes, that is the damn point.
you know, i think a lot of folks aren’t understanding that the test isn’t to see whether you’ll obey without question.
the test is to see whether you’ll throw a shitfit.
like if someone says “i don’t want to meet at a coffee shop, how about seafood shack?” and you’re like “uh er well, problem, i’m allergic to seafood and also confession time i picked a coffee shop because i’m broke,” that is a reasonable, calm response, and you passed the test. you can then agree to go do a low cost non-seafood thing like feeding ducks in the park, and all is well. it’s okay that you didn’t agree, because you were friendly and civilized about it.
you would’ve failed the test if you’d started drama over it, like “oh my god are you always this hard to please???” or if you’d ignored their objection, or tried to bullrush them like “no we’re doing it my way because i asked first“ or something. that’d be a fail.
and the one that rain implies, and which straight men do to women all the fucking time and it is SO RUDE, is demanding an explanation. “BUT WHY???” is the whine of a 2-year-old, and does not belong in polite conversations between adults. it is the prelude to an argument. you demand that the other person explain themself, and they know you’re going to pick at their reasons and try to get them to concede that logically they don’t get to object. it’s incredibly obnoxious. people who do this are not good at relationships.
asking reasons for troubleshooting purposes is something you can do once you know someone a little better, and have some idea what their life situation and conflict resolution styles are. once they know you’re not going to try to wheedle them to exhaustion like a toddler, you can be like “any particular reason? maybe we can find a coffee shop that doesn’t have that problem.” but when meeting a stranger for the first time, you are not owed an explanation, and it comes across as dangerously entitled and pushy to demand one.
but since you don’t do that, dear reader, you’ve no need to worry about this technique becoming widespread. it won’t affect your relationships at all.
just moving along like everyone else 