rosalosa

[rosalosa]

observation: among a certain subset of tumblr users, the term “blorbo” has become unchic, but the concept it describes is still important; and so it has been replaced with “The Character”

[rosalosa]

The real reason why you need to be social is the best chinese place within 10 miles is an unknown hole in the wall with a yearly marketing budget of $15 dollars and you will never, ever find it unless someone tells you about it.

[rosalosa]

actually as long as we're talking about realistic expectations of ageing, the nature of social media decontextualising people's personal posts has absolutely given some of you guys a false and potentially dangerous view of how your body is expected to change over time. I semi frequently see people sharing or repackaging commentary on experiences with disability as if it's an inevitable part of getting older. and like, yes, as you get older you are likely to develop new conditions, injuries or disabilities, but you need to understand your body's baseline well enough to identify those changes and interrogate them.

e.g. if you are seriously having such bad joint or back pain in your 30s that it hampers your day to day activities, you need to take that seriously. that is not 'just ageing', that's potentially an indicator of an underlying condition, unaddressed injury (which is quite common but will get worse if you don't notice and take care of it) or daily habits (poor posture, poor diet, sedentary lifestyle) causing cumulative damage to your body.

I know plenty of 30+ and 40+ year olds who are not especially athletic but who can still climb up and down stairs with ease, sit on the floor and get up again without discomfort, have floor or shower sex, ride a bike, wrestle a dog or a kid, climb a tree, maybe even do a handstand. there is no shame at all in developing pain or mobility issues which limit the kinds of things you can do comfortably, but it doesn't serve anyone to pretend that those changes are bound up with reaching a certain age. even in your 60s and 70s and beyond you should notice if you start feeling a new kind of pain or physical limitation. don't dismiss this shit just because someone told you "yeah that happens when you pass 30"

[rosalosa]

when u move out you can go to a living room and use your phone there instead of being in your bedroom. it's allowed

[rosalosa]

John Green may be a little "cringe" but credit where credit is due at least he's a YA author who made his special interest trying to expand tuberculosis care instead of trying to make a living hell for trans women and other LGBTQ+s

[rosalosa]

Hetbait kind of goes harder than queerbait sometimes. Queerbait you understand that the creators very rarely could do it even if they wanted to so implication and suggestion was better and safer than being explicit. Hetbait though there's no such justifiable reason they just want to fuck with you.

[rosalosa]

so i wore a pride flag pin to work the other day and the kids were all interested (obviously) (find me a classroom of preschoolers who are not obsessed with rainbows) (i'll wait) so they crowded around to see.

"aww!" they said, "it's a flag!!"

but the thing is: they're little. a lot of them don't really have a handle on all their mouth sounds yet.

such as, notably, that tricky tricky "L" sound.

[rosalosa]

you can be both employed & way too online. it’s called “posting on the clock,” and actually, it’s praxis.

[rosalosa]

drinking water when I have a headache should give instant relief. it should go away. what's even the point of drinking water if it can't do that

[rosalosa]

okay now that we’ve a had couple lesbian blockbusters and milfs are having a romance moment, we need to bring back the manic pixie dream girl. she was never fuckin suited to fixing all the problems of some boring twenty year old everyman, but you know who could actually benefit from a quirky free-spirited blue haired girl with pronouns (she/they)? a newly divorced forty-something mom who’s trying to learn how to be herself for the first time in her life

[rosalosa]

Everyone warns you agaist going to the supermarket hungry, but nobody tells you about the dangers of going there too full: I do not want any of these things, for I will never require any food again at all!

[rosalosa]

i know her heart was in the right place but my mom wrote this in the funniest way possible

[rosalosa]

Late, but...

(The game in question - https://store.steampowered.com/app/2248890/The_Beekeepers_Picnic/)

[rosalosa]

[rosalosa]

truly do not understand workplace drama. we're stuck here doing stupid bullshit for 8 hours and you want to make it worse? But on the other hand I love hearing about arguments that are not and never will be my problem

[rosalosa]

I’ve seen some posts floating around saying things like, “Belinda was always a mom, the Doctor just corrected the timeline,” and I genuinely cannot stress enough how little that addresses the core issues people have with how her story was handled.

First of all, if that was the intention—if the idea was that Belinda was always meant to be a mother and the timeline just needed to be “set right”—they did a poor job of executing it. A twist that major, one that fundamentally alters a character’s identity or arc, requires setup. Foreshadowing. Emotional groundwork. You can’t just spring something that massive on the audience in the last five minutes and expect it to feel meaningful instead of disorienting.

And here’s the thing: Doctor Who has done that kind of plot before—successfully. A great comparison is Amy and Rory. The show literally did the “someone you love was erased from time and the universe needs to be corrected to bring them back” storyline already. And while I’ve got my own qualms with how Amy’s arc was handled overall, that particular beat actually worked.

Why? Because there were signs. The cracks in time. The missing memories. A sense of loss Amy couldn’t place. Little inconsistencies that made the audience lean forward and feel that something was wrong. Not to mention: Rory was introduced before he disappeared. We knew him. We saw his dynamic with Amy. We cared about him. We barely see Poppy in these two episodes, other than "child missing bad" we really have no attachment to her.

Now imagine if we never met Rory. If Amy had been introduced as a fierce, independent woman with no attachments, someone whose refusal to be tied down was a defining trait—and then the show suddenly revealed, in the finale, that actually she was about to get married the whole time to a man we’d never seen, and now she’s a devoted wife. No buildup. No context. Just surprise! emotional transformation. That would feel bizarre, right?

That’s exactly what happened with Belinda.

The final minutes of the finale reframe her not just as someone who once had a child, but as someone whose true self is supposedly defined by that role—and we’re meant to believe that this identity has now been “restored” to her, and we’re told it’s been restored to her as a reward. But it doesn’t feel like a revelation. It feels like a contradiction.

It’s like they wanted to write her as fierce and independent, but didn’t also want to imply that she wanted kids or thought about kids—because society still tends to associate maternal longing or caretaking instincts with weakness, or with not being a “strong” woman. So instead of exploring that complexity, they just didn’t. They wrote her as a fully autonomous character, with no visible yearning or absence, and then stapled a child onto her arc at the end.

And just to be absolutely clear: the problem is not that Belinda is a mother. You can write a fierce, independent, female-presenting character who’s also a parent. Those things are not mutually exclusive. The problem is that the story didn’t earn it.

Writers often avoid giving powerful women maternal traits because they assume femininity and strength can’t coexist—but that’s a separate conversation. The real issue here is that the show never showed us that this part of Belinda was missing. It never laid the groundwork for that emotional restoration to resonate. It didn’t feel like they revealed who she truly was—it felt like they replaced her with someone else.

It’s not that you can’t tell a story where a forgotten child or a missing family is recovered from a broken timeline. That kind of emotional twist can be powerful. But if that’s the story you want to tell, you have to earn it. You have to make the absence felt before you try to fill it. You have to let us sense the missing piece and ache for its return. Without that, it doesn’t feel like a twist—it feels like a contradiction.

And no, Poppy showing up once in The Story & the Engine is not proper setup. If this was truly the intended arc from the beginning, then it needed clues. Give us subtle signs. Let Belinda hesitate when asked simple questions. Let her glance at a photo and seem unsettled. Let her correct someone’s memory and then immediately second-guess herself. Plant a sense of wrongness in her own life that even she can’t quite name.

There’s even a interview with RTD about reshooting the beginning of The Robot Revolution to give Belinda roommates, because he thought no one would buy her owning an entire house by herself.

But if this twist with Poppy was truly planned from the start? Then leave her in that big, echoing house. Let it be part of the unease. Let there be a child’s toy tucked into the back of a drawer she doesn’t remember buying. A room she avoids, too pristine and untouched. A lullaby she hums under her breath without knowing where she learned it. Give us texture. Give us silence that feels too quiet.

Let us feel the shape of what’s missing before you tell us what it was.

That’s how you write a twist that resonates—by trusting your audience to notice the gaps, to feel the ache, and to recognize the truth when it finally appears. Not by pulling a rabbit out of a hat and calling it destiny.

[rosalosa]

haha thats so funny [face gets gravely serious] but were you not a staunch and trusted ally i would have you executed for such a joke