aprocyonblogs

[aprocyonblogs]

[aprocyonblogs]

Hey students, here’s a pro tip: do not write an email to your prof while you’re seriously sick.

Signed, a person who somehow came up with “dear hello, I am sick and not sure if I’ll be alive to come tomorrow and I’m sorry, best slutantions, [name]”.

[aprocyonblogs]

I’m not mutuals with many people but please repost.

[aprocyonblogs]

i don’t know why i love this so much but i do

[aprocyonblogs]

[aprocyonblogs]

Hard truth that I’ve had to confront that I’m honestly not proud of:

Constantly voicing your abandonment issues lead to more people abandoning you.

I do not mean in Serious Conversations about what you need in a relationship or anything like that - I mean when your friend plays a video game with a different friend for a few days and you feel like your world is crumbling, that is not the time to talk about them.

I understand the fear that someone will decide they are done with you. I live that fear every single day, but here’s the rub.

If you tell people “you’ll probably leave me anyway” or similar things every time you feel that fear, people will leave you.

Not because they don’t want to be your friend, your partner, your roommate, whatever. Not because you aren’t deserving of friends (you are), but because it is exhausting to be constantly told by someone you like/love to go away.

Because that is how it feels on the other end. I don’t say this to make it worse, or to make you feel like you’re at fault. Your brain is hurting you, and it’s okay to feel things. But if you find that it’s hard to keep people around you, then you need to hear that outside of things like conversations about boundaries and triggers and such, it would be to your benefit to change your language.

Instead of telling people “you probably don’t like me”, try asking. “You like me? It’s much easier for them to reassure you when you don’t start with a negative, because it puts your brain in a different mindset, one that finds it easier to believe their response.

Sit with your issues. Parent them. And when they’re done screaming, hold their little hands and dry their little faces and try to remember that you are worth being loved. I won’t say it’s easy, because it’s really fucking not. I won’t say you’ll get it the first time, or that you’ll never fuck up. I still do. But you deserve friends and partners and love, it’s just that so do they.

[aprocyonblogs]

i cannot for the life of me find that essay about how sterilized, approachable, “nice” literature was used in victorian england to create a cultural imaginary that wholeheartedly ignored the atrocities being committed by the state, but every time i see someone sincerely make the argument that escapist stories are the only moral form of storytelling it rings in my head like a bell. it haunts me. some of y’all actually think that wide-scale erasure is better that attempting to grapple with messy reality in fiction and it’s honestly so exhausting

[aprocyonblogs]

Alright this is rly sad but here goes. I started doing my once-in-awhile bot purge from my followers list. And. I used to be able to just quickly scan and see the bots. They were the ones with default icons and generator-sounding names like "noun-girl-827". And if you weren't sure, you could click on the blog and it would be immediately obvious it was a bot because there's either just bad porn click bait, or nothing there.

Well. This time I had to give up immediately because I got like ten followers down the list and was having immense trouble figuring out who's a bot and who's real. Never ever used to see this but like 5/10 of the first few followers I checked on had just totally empty blogs. It wasn't until I'd already blocked 2 - assuming bots bc empty blogs - that I thought to check if they had any likes. And bam! There it was. All of their user activity.

We have people on this website now who have never reblogged a single post.

Y'all, I'm sure you're sick of seeing "you have to reblog thing" but you literally have to reblog things. That is how this website works. You understand that, right? How do you think the post you hit "like" on got in front of you? It wasn't because you liked enough things and Tumblrs algorithm figured out what you like enough to hand it to you. It's because you followed someone, a human person, who reblogged that post. And it came from another person who also reblogged it.

You are killing this website by refusing to interact with it in the way that makes it better than the other websites you ran from to come here.

Anyway, I'm sure you're all nice people, but I'm not going to play the "bot or not" game if you have an empty blog I'm going to block you.

[aprocyonblogs]

I lost my best friend 3 years ago- not lost as in dead but lost as in we only text each other on our birthdays now. Movies and books don't tell you that a friendship dying is like the sinking of a ship, you try to get higher and higher and hold onto the rails and unanswered texts, the captain tries to steer it to safety and salvage pieces of two broken hearts until you're left with memories of what once was. We were friends for a decade and knew each other's diaries by heart, I still remember her phone number and the way she took her coffee. Seeing her in streets is like breathing in a scent you forgot you knew but it immediately takes you back to a summer in '07.

Movies and books also don't tell you that friendships don't just end after one fight or incident, it's like the rusting of a bridge, the slow decay of flesh and bones and secrets. It took weeks, months- until one day I woke up and I realized I hadn't thought of her in a while. And I wrote a poem that day and I titled it 'The dying of a best friend' and I put all my love for her in a tiny box with my half of the matching pendant of a dolphin we had and stored them in a corner of my heart under the heading Grief. Where else can one hide unspent love?

It's been 3 years since I lost my best friend, lost as in I still carry our secrets in a tiny box but we only text each other on our birthdays.

-Ritika Jyala, excerpt from The world is a sphere of ice and our hands are made of fire

Edit: here's the visualizer for this piece

[aprocyonblogs]

already got a blazed marvel post. the adpocalypse is closer than we think so heres your daily PSA

don't interact with corporate tumblr accounts

yes even to dunk on them. i don't care if you have the sickest burn of the century lined up, don't even give them the time of day

the eventual and inevitable fall of twitter marks a change in the advertising industry, and tumblr is unclaimed territory. if we want tumblr to remain the social media bastion it has become, it needs to remain as unappealing to corporations as possible. do not engage. in a marketing strategist's eyes, any kind of attention is good attention. don't "silence, brand" them. don't kungpowpenis them. don't send them hate anons. don't hate-follow them. corporate tumblrs are not a single entity and they will not be harassed off this site. we only have a shot at repelling them because of tumblr's lack of an algorithm. so turn off recommended posts on your dashboard, put it chronological order, and install an adblocker. if you don't seek out these blazed posts and actively ignore them when they happen upon you, the corporations will starve. in this case, the best kind of protest is a silent one

[aprocyonblogs]

absolute fucking king weird al encouraging proper means of watching his new biopic

[aprocyonblogs]

my brother had a messy teen period of dabbling in “I identify as X”, “actually my name is [obvious full name of celebrity]”, and I was also a messy teen so it took me a few times of him doing it to figure out that it was worth trying to give as good as i got

he stopped after The First Time

Transphobes who say their pronouns are beep/boop or something else in their bio underestimate my willingness to adhere to those pronouns

[aprocyonblogs]

The Gender Census 2020 is now open!

[ Link ]

The seventh annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 12th March 2020.

After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a blog post summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.

If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, retweet this tweet, boost this Mastodon post, check out this post on Reddit, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks like Facebook. Every share is extremely helpful - it’s what helped us get 11,000 responses last year.

Survey URL: https://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/s/gendercensus2020/

The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.

Thank you so much!

[aprocyonblogs]

I’m constantly torn between the ‘be kind to everyone’ and the ‘fuck everyone you owe them nothing’ mentalities 

[aprocyonblogs]

When I complain about being a ‘gifted’ kid who grew into a talentless adult I don’t mean that I’m not trying to work on my talents or anything

I mean that the ‘gifts’ I had are useless

Reading books above my age isn’t a talent when I’m not eleven

Knowing big words isn’t a talent when I’m not a kid, it’s just growing up

It’s just a weird thing that happens and it feels shitty when you’re brought up being told you’re an exceptional child only to realise as an adult you’re just average

[aprocyonblogs]

The story of C

Here’s a story from last summer that I never got around to telling.

So I worked at my camp last year teaching a cartoon drawing class. The kids loved me. They loved all the college student staff members, they thought we were so cool. My campers in my class called me Dungeon Master all week. 

But anyway, there was this group of middle school boys in my class, 13-14 year olds. They were a handful, obviously. But they liked me, so they listened to like 90% of what I said and getting seventh grade boys to listen to me is one of my biggest accomplishments tbh. There was this one of them that we’ll call C. 

C was new to camp. A couple of the boys I had taught or seen the year before, so they knew me. But it was C’s first year. C was a problem camper. He acted out, he had a hard time connecting with his cabin-mates and making friends, he was annoying during group events and distracted the other campers. C was one of the campers the staff would talk after hours about how to deal with him. 

In my class, there were several things I noticed about C. C made drawings that were vaguely racist or antisemitic. He said things that were mean or edgy and acted very much like a 13 year old boy. He also joked almost constantly about how he was ugly and nobody liked him.

But C was easily one of my favorite students. He was actually enthusiastic about my class. While most of the boys his age just kinda doodled and goofed off, C would ask me for prompts. Every day he would ask me what he should draw, and I’d tell him some silly thing, and he’d actually try to draw it. He was a huge pain in the ass and he never shut up during my mini-lectures, but I could tell that he was actually taking it seriously even if he was trying to hide how much he liked it, because liking things isn’t cool when you’re that age. It was easy to spot a kid who really wanted to try but was buried under a truckload of middle-school self-consciousness.

So the last day of camp came and I had all my campers gather everything they had drawn that week so I could display it under their names. C was very distressed. I sat down with him to ask why. He told me he was embarrassed of his drawings and didn’t want anyone to see them. And then he said:

“What if someone sees this and thinks I’m autistic?”

Okay.

Bear in mind, I had prepared for this. I knew I was dealing with 7th/8th grade boys and I knew one of them would say this. It’s a popular thing to say for people their age. So I said:

“Well, you’d be in good company then. You know who else is autistic?”

He looked confused for a moment, and then his eyes opened up super wide and he said “Is it you?!”

I said “And I’m cool, right?”

And he said “…Yeah!”, like slack-jawed in awe. He wasn’t even embarrassed about the comment or anything. He was genuinely shocked and impressed that someone autistic could be someone like me. I completely blew his mind. 

And his friend was sitting there watching this whole exchange, and then they both started freaking out about it. Their third friend came over and was like “What’s going on?” and the second one smacked the back of his head and yelled “YOU MISSED A HEARTFELT MOMENT”

C said that I made the week for him. We ended up putting up all his drawings and I told him that if anyone thought he was autistic he should take it as a compliment. And also that his drawings kick ass.

TLDR: I worked at a camp and bonded with a 13 year old boy and totally changed his perception of autistic people