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peak silly little guy has officially arrived

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"Can trace the image" refers to how you might draw a shape in the air with your finger– there's nothing there, but you can create/follow the shape.

The inability to generate mental imagery is aphantasia. Anon is curious about some of the nuanced specifics that the common "tests" don't always get into.

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We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.

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To be aware you might be trans but unwilling to do anything about it is to create endlessly bigger boxes within which to contain yourself. When you are a child, that box might encompass only yourself and your parents. By the time you are a gainfully employed adult, that box will contain multitudes, and the thought of disrupting it will grow ever more unthinkable. So you cease to think of yourself as a person on some level; you think not of what you want but what everybody expects from you. You do your best not to make waves, and you apologize, if only implicitly, for existing. You stop being real and start being a construct, and eventually, you decide the construct is just who you are, and you swaddle yourself up in it, and maybe you die there. There is still time until there isn’t.

This reading of TV Glow’s deliberately anticlimactic, noncathartic ending cuts against the transition narrative you typically see in movies and TV, in which a trans person self-accepts, transitions, and lives a happier life. Owen gets trapped in a space where he knows what he must do to live an authentic life but simply refuses to take those steps because, well, burying yourself alive is a terrifying thing to do. The transition narrative posits a trans existence as, effectively, a binary switch between “man” and “woman” that gets flipped one way or another, but to make our lives so binary is to miss how trans existences possess an inherent liminality.

Humans’ lives unfold in a constant state of becoming until death, but trans people are uniquely keyed in to what this means thanks to the simple fact of our identities. You can get lost in that liminality, too, forever trapped in a midnight realm of your own making, stuck between what you believe is true (I am a nice man with a good family and a good job, and I love my life) and what you know, deep in your most terrified heart of hearts, is real (I am a girl suffocating in a box).

And yet if you want to read the film as being about the dangerous allure of nostalgia, you’re not wrong. I Saw the TV Glow totally supports that interpretation, too! But in tempting you with that reading, the film creates a trap for cis viewers that will be all too familiar to trans viewers. Somewhere in the middle of Maddy’s story about The Pink Opaque being real, you will make a choice between “This kid has lost it!” and “No. Go with her, Owen,” and in asking you to make that choice, TV Glow is simulating the act of self-accepting a trans identity.

See, the grimmer read of the film’s ending truly is a nihilistic one. It leaves no hope, no potential for growth, no exit. Yet you must actively choose to read that ending as nihilistic. If you are cis and the end of I Saw the TV Glow left you with a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction, a weird but hard-to-pin-down feeling that something had broken, and a melancholy bordering on horror — congratulations, this movie gave you contact-high gender dysphoria.

In an infinite number of possible universes, there is at least one where I am still living “as a man,” embracing my fictionality, avoiding looking at how much more raw and real I feel when I “pretend” to be a woman. I think about that guy sometimes. I hope he’s okay.

Consider, then, my cis reader, that TV Glow is for both you and me, but it is maybe most of all for him. I hope he sees it. I hope he breaks down crying in the bathroom afterward. I hope he, after so many years locked inside himself, hears the promise of more life through the hiss of TV static.

Emily St. James, “I Saw the TV Glow’s Ending Is Full of Hope, If You Want It to Be,” Vulture. June 4, 2024.

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i think everyone should program at least once just so you realise just how fucking stupid computers are. because theyre so fucking stupid. a computer wants to be told what to do and exactly that and if you make one typo or forget one detail it starts crying uncontrollably

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new avatar. trying a little something different this year.

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Machine That Makes It All Better

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i know in the text murderbot does have a human/close to human appearance but when i see gifsets of the show and they just look like some guy i am disappointed

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after watching the most recent seasons of Doctor Who I am growing concerned that Russell T Davies is being possessed by the ghost of Shinzo Abe

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me (very normal): i just think it would be really funny if team cherry shadowdropped silksong right now

me (absolutely fine): like, you know, haha everyone's playing deltarune it'd be so silly to release silksong right now

me (teeth gritted from now perfectly regular i am): just jokes, you know, just a silly joke, not like i'm secretly holding out hope for it or anything don't be silly

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my problem as a writer and as a roleplayer is that I always want characters to do that thing where you hold your hand out, palm to the ground, and kind of tilt it quickly left and right to express uncertainty or a "kinda-sorta"/"yes and no" vibe. but I don't know an official term for this so I always just call it the Noncommittal Hand Waggle

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i maintain that sun/moon is the best gen of pokemon only let down by one small factor: every single battle can turn into an endless slog of sos pokemon being called in by your opponent. oh fucking god its a nightmare i loathe it i will never replay it. but aside from that its perfect

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the more i hear about the post game endgame of blue prince the more i sink into despair

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google can foxes drink beer google can i give beer to a fox google best alcohol for foxes

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A recent post breached containment so I think it's time for some rent lowering:

Trans children should have the right to undergo the correct puberty at the same time as their peers.

Puberty blockers were only ever a compromise and should not be seen as the end goal of trans advocacy.