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It's a beautiful morning to hate running! See y'all in 5K.

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my balcony blocks my view of the playground, but I heard one child yell "I FOUND A FROG" with a great deal of excitement and now there is screaming, so I'm filling in some blanks

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Would you love me if I was a worm revived after 46,000 years who's back in the news?

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5 years ago, I was in Rehab.

10 years ago, I was watching my Potential and Opportunities dissolve and evaporate in an ocean of cheap gin and expensive whiskey.

But 5 years ago, I was in Rehab.

One of the exercises they had us perform was to imagine ourselves happy, 5 years in the future.

Many of us in that room had forgotten how to imagine nice things happening to them. A few snorted (well, I snorted), finding the notion that we’d even still be around in 5 years grimly humorous.

For about half of us, it was the last stop on the way down.

But I indulged the therapist. I was there, after all, because I did not want to die. So, I imagined myself, 5 years hence.

Happy.

It came to me all at once; an artistic remix on Norman Rockwell’s Freedom From Want, reframed with myself placing food at the table.

Sunday Dinner At My Place, I answered, when it came my turn to share my fantasy. I was asked what food I imagined eating.

It’s not the meal itself, I said, it’s the implications framed around it. Sunday Dinner At My Place means that I have a Place. It means that I have Family that will actually speak to me and friends who actually want to see me. It means money enough not just to feed myself but others too. It means having the time to spare to take the time preparing the meal.

A lot of nodding heads all around me. A struck chord. Many people with no Place, in that place. Nowhere that would lament their leaving.

5 years hence, as I lay down to sleep in my Home, with my Wife and my Son, surrounded by my Art and my Flowers, I reflect.

It was a long road. It was hard. We lost people. So many people. There were long days and long nights and hospital stays. Angry arguments with ghosts. I changed, in ways I never hoped for, or expected. Good ways, finally, for once. Slowly, against the backdrop of a world in chaos, I found my mind.

Sometimes, My Wife wondered aloud, what she did to deserve me. After some stumbling with my feelings, I eventually settled on an answer.

I’m a Rescue.

She gave me a Home.

And, so, I gave her a Family.

It seemed fair

This Sunday, my folks, which whom I have not had a shouting match in years, will come over for dinner. We will cook and eat together. My Friend became My Wife, and she took a piece of me and with it she made Our Son. There will be many hugs, and no violence. Good Things Happened.

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you don’t know what the future holds.

don’t give up yet, ok?

It could get good, even.

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It’s come to my attention that some people are traversing the interwebs of fandom without ever hearing of the Ms. Scribe Story or the Cassandra Claire Debacle.

At surface level, this is concerning because they are awesome stories, and everyone’s life is made a little better when they find an awesome story.

On more serious levels, fandom is a wacky place, full of people doing wacky, occasionally damaging things to each other. Some of that has evolved, but some of it is the same as it ever was. History rocks because you can learn from the mistakes of others, and maybe hurt people a little less in the future. Fandom being a giant, convoluted web of passion, some history that could use sharing goes missed.

The two stories linked are from early 2000s Harry Potter fandom. The Ms. Scribe Story is a tale of one person’s aggressive use of sockpuppets to work their way up fandom hierarchy. The Cassandra Claire Debacle is about how the top name in that fandom hierarchy is a plagiarist.

They’re prime examples of fandom being fandom in intensely negative ways. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a brand of fandom toxicity that isn��t on display in some way within these write-ups, and while that is admittedly sort of depressing, having things to point at that make you stop and think, ��Wait, I’ve seen this before, this is not a thing I want to be part of,” can keep you out of some of the deeper fandom pitfalls.

They are also deeply fascinating reads. If you haven’t explored them before, or only know the summary versions, give them a shot.

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ive read the first 6 murderbot books in the last three days is this accurate

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I want to extend a heartfelt thank you to my dear friend in crime, @manggageprek Audris, for your incredibly insightful consultant work on Remembrance for our version of Xanthe Zhou as a Chindo shaman. If you'd like to support my incredibly talented friend's work, please check out some of their short stories that have been released recently!!

A beautiful story about a trans masc and their shaman/dukun boyfriend. (I drew the top illustration as a visualization for this story)

A powerfully gripping short story expressing raw rage over Chinese Indonesian cultural genocide in Indonesia.

My friend is available for consultant work of all sorts as well! :)

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I used to be a proficient googler who never wasted a word but since Google is near useless no matter how good you are at it now I have reverted to just typing in entire questions like an old person

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The company now legally known as “THAT COMPANY WHOSE NAME USED TO CONTAIN HTML SCRIPT TAGS LTD” was set up by a British software engineer, who says he did it purely because he thought it would be “a fun playful name” for his consulting business.

The original name of the company was ““><SCRIPT SRC=HTTPS://MJT.XSS.HT> LTD”. By beginning the name with a quotation mark and chevron, any site which failed to properly handle the HTML code would have mistakenly thought the company name was blank, and then loaded and executed a script from the site XSS Hunter, which helps developers find cross-site scripting errors.

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A small piece of good news. Andry Hernandez Romero, one of the many people who was sent to CECOT by the regime, has been sent back to Venezuela after 125 days. If the name sounds familiar, he is a 31 year old gay make up artist who was disappeared with the excuse of him having tattoos.

Im watching a livestream. Don’t have a link to a story

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Sometimes I have to remind my dad that he’s a master furniture maker and most people do not possess encyclopedic knowledge of European and American furniture styles and the history of wood glue

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I went to a llama event today and I kept going up to ask the tween 4-H girls about llamas and they all just changed the subject to horses at the first opportunity

poor kids… born to horsegirl, forced to llama