724bees

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When I put my hair up I think of him

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i was so good at this water sort mobile game and i’m stuck on level like 348 and i’m convinced this one is impossible. i was stuck on it for weeks like a year ago and then quit and came back to it recently with a new hunger and vengeance and it’s kicking my ass i swear

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when things are already pretty horsey but then the situation

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I am a skinny aspect ratio supremacist except for the duration of time that I am watching ben hur (1959)

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Sexual Memorabilia (I), 2015 by Georgia Grace Gibson

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this is actually legitness

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For every post discussing fatphobia on here there are 10 skinny people in the notes who have supposedly been encountered by the nefarious "burger man" who tells people to eat more burgers

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youtube recommended me an hour long video where someone rants about the decline of build a bear as a brand and I decided to watch maybe 15 minutes or so not for any insight, but instead as a form of people watching. what kind of life would an adult my age lead to feel that kind of consumer betrayal? not because build a bear is cringe but because build a bear is expensive. ridiculously expensive. the only time in my life where i walked into a build a bear and did not immediately walk out was when my old-old ex took me there for my 18th birthday and got me a twilight sparkle plush because we were looking at the cost of these custom bears and their clothes and going "holy fuck whaaaaat". a build a bear ride or die is built very different from me.

you probably deduced from the thumbnail (as well as from the nature of these consumer grievance type videos) that the thing this person has an issue with is the overall modern day "aesthetic". the store has downsized considerably in the last decade and resembles a regular toy store moreso than its older workshop-like setup. at one point she near-tearily mulls over how many malls only have a "dinky little kiosk" instead of an actual location. she hates the fluorescent lights and minimalist style shelves. she doesn't get why things that were once painted surfaces are now interactable screens. she gushes over the things she loved about the old store as if she's seeing it all for the first time in between talking extensively about her personal relationship to certain accessories and plush types. she hates that so many of the plushies are just licensed characters now. she misses the experience of being in the store as a child. she misses the bears from her childhood that she regretfully gave away. she doesn't like that these things that meant so much to her are going away and that she doesn't know how to get them back. at one point, she mentions that she tried to go back to the store a few years ago and (pausing repeatedly as if hovering above some kind of inscrutable alien truth) that buying a bear and paying $30+ for clothes "just wasn't...fun?" but immediately combats the instinct to investigate these feelings by arguing that this is the store's fault for not being fun. that build a bear is failing because it is not more accommodating to adults.

with any other youtuber who was confounded by the fact that novelty things from their childhood did not survive the forces of the market 15+ years later (and had to shuffle around its brand aesthetics to see what would maybe make investors happy while also minimizing cost) I would probably have just stopped watching at the 15 minute mark, but I found myself fascinated by this humorism powered hydraulic performance. she simmers in nostalgia happily, reliving her memories with every image of old build a bear she superimposes over the screen, before snapping into a state of sadness and confusion once the image has been taken away. it takes about 25 minutes in for her to start verbalizing her frustration towards all modern day toy aesthetics. "why did they do this? what makes them do this? why does everything look like this now? I don't understand" she's less asking a question and more unable to reconcile that a part of her life which once possessed tangibility no longer exists, and the transactional nature of her relationship with build a bear is what specifically makes her unable to make peace with this. she cannot accept that she cannot buy back this time that was lost because her time as a child in build a bear was something that she purchased in the first place. the experience is tied so much to build a bear as an enterprise and transaction that to simply separate what she liked about it and pursue something that resembles that is inconceivable, and instead that the only choice is to. retvrn to build a bear.

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squidward, meaning "in the direction of squid"

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checking in on bluesky

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honestly, a lot of my "evil autism" / not innately knowing how to be nice to people might come from being so alexithymic and numb to my own joy that i do not realize that i need people and actually can enjoy being around them, unless i have that signposted for me or i make a point of savoring that good feeling when it is strong enough for me to notice it. my main benchmarks right now are that after i have had positive social contact i am more productive, have greater mental clarity, sing more, and like myself more. but i dont necessarily experience the socializing itself as like "a thing i was happy during" because so much of my attention was devoted to masking/not seeming crazy/being an active listener/stress. hm.