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as a CSA survivor I honestly think that the number one way to prevent child abuse is to surround kids with adults who treat them with respect. partially because it means there are people for kids to turn to in times of crisis. but also it makes kids way less vulnerable to the magnetism of “wow this adult is the first person to treat me as a human being. better do whatever I can to keep their respect”

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I'm not slow. I'm not unreasonable. I am intelligent, capable, competent, and my concerns are reasonable and valid. I do not deserve to be talked down to, condescended too or treated like a worry wart or a dog who just needs a pat on the head to stop barking at the bird that flew past the window

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I know I spend a lot of time giving benefits of the doubt to people who probably don't deserve it and I know people tend to talk down to me and condescend to me in that "gentle" way that is REALLY common from abled folks talking to disabled and neurodivergent folks and I know I've been legitimately gaslit many (many) times and I know that the first thing is partly a coping mechanism for the rest because otherwise I'd be questioning like 90% of the interactions I have with people but sometimes it's just like omfg can you people just take me seriously for once

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i will never make a fandom sideblog you will get everything on one blog and you will like it. you will learn to love all my interests even if you followed for just one. my blog #myblog

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This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

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Very fancy potato bear postcard from my collection, unsent and date unknown.

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not to be tmi but i was so relieved as a teen when i figured out that my masturbatory fantasies and my actual sex life had literally nothing to do with each other, nor did they need to

i was terrified i was going to end up getting hurt but it turns out when you’re having actual sex with an actual person the things that do it for you can be completely different

i have had plenty of great sex that i’m still not going to fantasize about because when it’s just me thinking about it and not an actual person doing it, it’s not hot anymore

there are plenty of things that in real life are actually just uncomfortable and not arousing at all and i will never do them, but even if i’ve tried it and decided it’s not for me it’s still gonna show up in fantasies because it’s still hot to think about

i mean it sounds stupid and obvious but i spent years either trying to stop myself from finding things hot (spoiler it don’t work), or else letting people convince me that fantasies were talking the talk and obligated me to try walking the walk

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if you're in Europe PLEASE consider signing the Stop Destroying Games initiative. the deadline is July 31st 2025. i've posted about it before; it aims to create legislation for publishers to stop killing the games you pay for and to provide an end-of-life plan for live-service products. thank you!!!

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jokes to make after failure that aren’t self-deprecating:

I’m the best to ever do it

Nobody saw that (best if said loudly)

No one’s ever done it like me

I could be President/they should make me President

Behold, a mere fraction of my power!

The public wants to be me soooooo bad

I’m an expert in (thing you just failed at)

How could this have happened to god’s favorite princess?

Nothing ibuprofen and a glass of water cant fix

I’m being sabotaged

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no way i just saw people in tiktok comments crying screaming throwing up at the idea of aslan being a jesus figure. worsties the lion literally dies to save edmund (the sinner) and then rises from the dead. he tells the pevensies he can be found under a different name in our world. what else could this have meant

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The fact that people don't think friendship is enough to justify characters doing insane acts of love for each other baffles me. Like have you never loved your friend so so much you want to live in their ribcage. Have you never been really weird about a friend. Have you never wanted to bite your friends parents or shove them down a staircase. Have you never wanted to be buried in the same grave as a friend. Have u never. How do u people live like this.

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teaching children that they are allowed to walk away and cool off if they are feeling overwhelmed might literally save their life as teens/adults

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Wish I had money to commission pictures of my ocs

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Swordsmaster from beyond🌙