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The trope where people don't recognize each other because it's been so long since they last interacted and they've both changed so much that they're basically strangers UNTIL one of them does their Signature Thing™ and the other just stops dead because oh. It's YOU. All at once it's so clearly you

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Daily life of a cat.

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i actually never ever want AO3 to be censored bc nothing is more fun than reading the tags on a fic and going “huh. didn’t know there was a market for that.”

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friend made my birthday cake

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I can finally share the rest of the cards I illustrated for the Neopets Battledome TCG- I got to draw the members of the Order of the Red Erisim!

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Cookie Review: Selena Gomez Oreos

There is something about the way in which the words SELENA GOMEZ are emblazoned on this package, larger and more important than OREO.

It's a little bit of a joke to say that these cookies have the flavor of Selena Gomez, but I do think that's how they're positioned, as otherwise, what is it? Selena Gomez is known as an actress and singer. You don't buy these cookies because you think that she makes great cookies which is then somehow distilled by the food scientists at Oreo, or that she has good taste as a culinary expert, no, the important thing is that they are a totem of the cultural artifact of Selena Gomez, a way to have a piece of her in cookie form. There is something of the Eucharist in it, a mystical communion with a transcendent figure.

There is, in small print, a concession to the idea that these have a specific taste that can be divorced from Selena Gomez herself. They're cinnamon and chocolate. But not just cinnamon and chocolate: Selena's cinnamon and chocolate.

Somewhere, there is a real Selena Gomez, but we are now so many steps removed from her that her name is a simple signifier, pointing not to the real physical woman, but to the concept of the woman. In the same way, the flavor of the cookies is one of the least important things about them, positioned in small print at the bottom of the labeling. The text sits there embarrassed, ashamed to admit that it is not simply the flavor of the abstract concept of Selena Gomez.

I read Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation and kind of hated it, mostly because it said with many words what could have been said with few. But one of the things that stuck with me was the idea that we have entered an era of hyperreality, one in which traditional distinctions between reality and representation have collapsed entirely, a world where we have symbols which refer only to themselves. The symbol of Selena Gomez still does point to a person and her body of work, but when looking at this package of cookies we can see how the symbol spills out beyond the bounds of reality. We are left to grapple with the fact that some things are implied to have Selena Gomez nature. This is the promise of the cookies.

And this raises the question: does the real, actual, living person Selena Gomez possess Selena Gomez nature? A part, certainly: this is the wellspring of the symbol, as managed and curated as she's been since her early days as a child actor. But we must expect that there are parts of Selena Gomez that don't have Selena Gomez nature, and in some sense we could call this authenticity, but in another sense, inauthenticity.

And even those elements of Selena Gomez that are known and presented to the public in this carefully curated way might not have Selena Gomez nature. The modern memetic cluster that defines Selena Gomez, the Selena Gomez referred to on the package of Oreos, has little to do with her childhood performances, and in some sense they are alien to the symbol now.

The most striking part of this packaging, for me, is that Selena Gomez appears to us only in letters, only in a monogram on the face of a cookie, a pair of headphones with Selena Gomez nature, a specifically chosen metallic red color that must also have Selena Gomez nature. But there's no image of Selena herself, the flesh and blood person, all that is merely implied, but also unimportant. You are meant to recognize the name, or possibly the aura.

They taste about how you'd expect a chocolate-cinnamon Oreo to taste.

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I really can’t stand anti-lawyer sentiment idgaf if your annoying uncle is a really smarmy personal injury lawyer or whatever the fuck it’s time to grow up and recognize that having an entire profession dedicated to understanding and upholding the law is actually extremely valuable to civilized society

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Explaining to straight adults that much of queer history happened within their lifetime and they were unaware of all the extremely important events and how many laws there were to prevent us from thriving because they werent part of queer circles themselves is like...

-leans in close-

How would you like to know about the war in Ba Sing Se?

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funniest thing about dnd is that I made my character a failson specifically to make a rich guy suffer, but I keep rolling really high on important things, so everything has been working out for him really well, and his belief that rich people should never face any consequences just keeps getting reinforced again and again

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Okay honestly it didn't hit me how funny the concept of Weird Al's Even Worse album is until I found out they'd have gone on sale side by side.

"Hmmm, do I want Bad, or Even Worse?"

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The first asexual person I met outside of the internet was a 65 year old woman.

I’d been interning with her as an artist/executive assistant for some time. To put a long story short she’d developed a tremor that kept her from doing a certain amount of studio work, so in between sending emails and invoices for her I’d chip in and help with line art or drafting on longer projects. A lot of it was the two of us sitting in her basement studio, doing our own thing, waiting for the phone to ring. We got to talking a lot. I’d just moved across the country and was still finding my footing.

There was a handyman she had over occasionally — he was a personal friend who enjoyed her company more than she enjoyed his. She didn’t dislike him by any means, but he definitely had feelings for her that she didn’t reciprocate. One day, after he’d come over to repair something-or-other and left, she and I started talking about relationships.

She asked if I had a boyfriend. I told her I wasn’t interested in being in a relationship with anyone and that I’d never had a desire to be in a relationship. Admittedly, I was bracing for the “You’ll meet the right person someday” response. I knew it generally came from a place of care, but it never changed how much I dreaded to hear it. I really respected my mentor and I was prepared to nod along to whatever response she gave me. Instead of anything I expected her to say, she just kind of nodded and said, “Me neither. I think I’m — what’s the term — asexual?”

I was ecstatic. I told her I was asexual, too. I saw her sigh in relief, the same way I did. I couldn’t believe it.

We didn’t get much work done that day, we just started talking about our experiences. She’d been married once when she was younger and even during that period of her life her disinterest in a sexual relationship didn’t change. She had a roommate after graduating college who confessed to having feelings for her and she had to tell her “It’s not that I don’t like girls, it’s that I don’t like anybody.” The roommate harbored enough bitterness over this that they had to split ways. Her mother told her that she would quote “rather have a gay daughter than a daughter who didn’t fancy anyone at all” unquote.

I didn’t have nearly as many experiences as she did, but I was able to share my own for the first time. I shared how it was easier to say I was taking time to work on myself than to say I had no interest in being in a relationship. We talked about the words “You’ll meet the right person someday” and “You’ll know when you’re in love” and “Don’t worry, one day you’ll meet some guy that changes everything.” As if something was broken.

“I’ve been alive for sixty five years,” my mentor told me, “and I’ve never felt like I was missing something, even if everybody told me I was.”

Currently, my mentor lives with her parrot, her cats, and her backyard-wildlife pals in a house that she owns. She makes art and hosts community art groups and volunteers at care homes and is the most self-fulfilled woman I’ve ever met. And she loves her life. She loves the people she knows and they love her, too. If I could be half as cool as she is when I grow up, I think that’d be pretty amazing.

“Asexuality” isn’t a problem to be fixed or a phase to grow out of. Sometimes you’re fifteen and sometimes you’re sixty-five. I knew in my heart that older asexual people existed but it changed me completely to meet one. We were here before and we always will be.

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hooooly fucking shit I founds the most shark plush ever

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Fairyring fans, chime in!