#and this isn't even about

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

License to Kitty.

[captainjonnitkessler]

Sometimes I wish we would start calling out the performative radicalism on this site for the poser bullshit it is. "Remember, it's always morally correct to kill a cop!" "Don't forget to firebomb your local government office!" "Wow, it sure would be a shame if these instructions on how to make a molotov cocktail got spread around!"

Okay. But you're not killing cops or firebombing government offices. You are posting on a dying microblogging website to a carefully-curated echo chamber that has radicalized itself into thinking that taking the absolute most extreme position on any subject is praxis but that anyone discussing the most practical way to effect actual change is your sworn enemy. You do not have the street cred OR the activist cred to be talking about killing cops, babe.

[lazylittledragon]

can't believe we're all adults being forced into the club penguin level of censorship in 2024

[january-summers]

"AO3 doesn't need a "dislike" button"

Um, actually, it already has one. Depending on your specs, it might look a little different but over all it looks kinda like this:

You can find it at the corner of your screen, which corner is dependent on your layout.

Anyway, if you dislike a fic, you can hit this Dislike Button until the fic goes away. It really is pretty amazing actually.

[chaotic-neutral-knitter]

I must not respond to the bad take. Responding to the bad take is the mind-killer. Responding to the bad take is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face the bad take. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the bad take has gone there will be nothing. Only I (and my good takes) will remain.

[uncanny-tranny]

I think so many people are so deeply alienated from themselves that they have no clue how to exercise their free will and autonomy. For some, this alienation runs so deep that they are afraid of their own autonomy and humanity. It is completely understandable why one would have those feelings, but it can be worrisome.

I want to help others who feel this way, so here are small things I have done to exercise my free will:

Add "guilty pleasure" songs to playlists and actually listen to them (I have a ton of late 1990s-early 2000s music I listen to now proudly that I never listened to in the past out of shame)

Getting the décor item, bath set, bed spread, ect. in the patterns you like, even if it's "childish" (I got a dinosaur-themed wastebasket from the kids' décor section and I adore it)

Taking a new route to get to a place you go to often

Eat dessert first

Celebrate well, and often

Collect things that are "odd" or don't seem like an "acceptable" thing to collect (somebody on my "for you" page collects dandelion crayola crayons and it was so cool!!!!!!)

Incorporate one new piece in an outfit you wear frequently (e.g., a new chain, a necklace, ribbons, bracelets, ect.). Challenge yourself to add onto the outfits if you feel up for it.

Sing along to songs without worrying that you sound "good" or your intonation is completely accurate

Read a book from a genre you weren't allowed to read as a kid (comics, thrillers, mysteries, anything!)

Walk without having a specific destination or goal

Pick up a new craft without expecting yourself to master it or to ever be "good" enough. Get your hands messy.

I don't want to shame anybody for not feeling as though they have free will or that they are exempt from exercising it. However, I wanted to give ideas so that you might read this list and find your own ways to express your intrinsic autonomy and will. You deserve to be a person, to feel alive, not just living. That is what our lives are for.

[inkskinned]

you're in the habit of denying yourself things.

if someone asked you directly, you would say that you love a little treat. you like iced coffee and getting the cookie. you drink juice out of a fancy cup sometimes, and often do use your candles until they gutter out helplessly.

but you hesitate about buying the 20 dollar hand mixer because, like. you could just use your arms. you weren't raised rich. you don't get to just spend the 20 dollars (remember when that could cover lunch?), at least - you don't spend that without agonizing over it first, trying to figure out the cost-benefits like you are defending yourself in front of a jury. yes, this rice cooker could seriously help you. but you do know how to make stovetop rice and it really isn't that hard. how many pies or brownies would you actually make, in order to make that hand mixer worthwhile?

what's wild is that if the money was for a friend, it would already be spent. you'd fork over 40 without blinking an eye, just to make them happy. the difference is that it's for you, so you need to justify it.

and it sneaks in. you ration yourself without meaning to - you don't finish the pint of ice cream, even though you want to. the next time you go to the store, you say ah, i really shouldn't, and then you walk away. you save little bits of your precious things - just in case. sometimes you even go so far as putting that one thing in your shopping cart. and then just leaving it there, because maybe-one-day, but not right now, there's other stuff going on.

you do self-care, of course. but you don't do it more than like, 3 days in a row. after that it just feels a little bit over-the-edge. like. you can't live in decadence, the economy is so bad right now, kid.

so you don't buy the rice cooker. you can-and-will spend the time over the stove. you can withstand the little sorrows. denial and discipline are practically synonyms. and you're not spoiled.

it's just - it's not always a rice cooker. sometimes it is a person or a job or a hug. sometimes it is asking for help. sometimes it is the summer and your college degree. sometimes it is looking down at scabbed knees and feeling a strange kind of falling, like you can't even recognize the girl you used to be. sometimes it is your handprint looking unsteady.

sometimes it is tuesday, and you didn't get fired, and you want to celebrate. but what is it you like, even? you search around your little heart and come up empty. you're so used to denying that all your desires draw a blank.

oh fuck. see, this is the perfect opportunity. if you had a mixer, you'd make a cake.

[ambrosiagourmet]

I think one of the biggest tragedies of Laios & Falin and their relationship is how much his actions impact her life. But like. Specifically how much they WOULDN’T impact her life as much if they weren’t both stuck in such a shitty abusive situation.

This part of the Falin-tries-makeup daydream hour comic is what got me thinking about it again because truly it just... it seems like such a like an offhand comment that I'm sure Laios didn't mean to be cruel or anything. That's just like. A little kid not thinking about what they are saying. ESPECIALLY when the kid in question is Laios.

But man they depended on each other SO much as kids. Too much. It really feels like they didn't have any other source of positive reinforcement, or anyone else to share themselves with. So of course an offhand comment like that has a huge impact on Falin.

Or this little bit from one of the flashbacks:

This tears me apart. Do you think it tears him apart to think about? I think it does. I think Laios holds every small failure to care for Falin against himself.

And then there's the Bigger stuff. The way that him coping with his own trauma ended up impacting her.

Like his interest in monsters. Like him going to find a ghost, and accidentally revealing Falin's magic to the whole village in the process.

Like him needing to leave. And leaving her behind.

He shaped her life so much, and he carries so much guilt for it. And again, there should have been other people there to help. The same things that made Laios need to leave home are the things that made his leaving so hard on Falin. She ate alone after that. She shouldn't have had to eat alone just because Laios wasn't there.

She was 9 when he left for school, and he was 11.

Nine. And Laios feels like he failed her because he didn't stand by her through this better. As an eleven year old.

Both of these kids deserved so much better from the world.

[bumbleboa]

I saw one scruffy older Cora-san design and had to draw my take on it immediately, with a bonus Law to fill space.

You can say a lot of things about One Piece Odyssey, but it did give us a Law & Cora tag-team fight in which Law shambled to the location of Cora's bullets and that is just objectively cool.

[batbabydamian]

injecting The Boy Wonder by Juni Ba into my veins

[wdapteo]

Phil supporting Dan will always be a love language

[pineapple-frenzy]

Book 2 au: sparring sessions and short hair katara

They like to have sparring sessions in order to keep their bending skills sharp. They allow themselves to go all out and not hold back at all cause they know if anyone got hurt, Katara could just heal them

But anyways, wouldn't it be kinda funny if Zuko accidentally burned Katara's hair tho? Aofkqldkkajfjd

The "I think we can save the hairloops" line is from @linnoya-writes thank you for that!! :>>

[lasnevadaslaborunion]

It frightens and discourages me how pervasive "tribal" stereotypes and imagery are in the fantasy and adventure genres.

It's all over the place in classic literature. Crack open a Jules Verne novel and you're likely to find caricatures of brown people and cultures, even when the characters are sympathetic to the plight of the colonized peoples - incidentally, this is the biggest reason I can't recommend 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to everyone, despite Captain Nemo being one of my favorite fictional characters of all time.

You can't escape it in modern cinema, either. You'll see white heroes venturing bravely into jungles and tombs to steal from natives who don't know how to use their resources "properly." You'll see them strung up in traps, riddled with sleeping darts, forced to flee and fight their way out. Hell, Pirates of the Caribbean, a remarkably inclusive franchise in many other ways, had an extended sequence of the white heroes escaping from a cannibal civilization in the second film.

And when fantasy RPGs want a humanoid enemy, the "bloodthirsty natives" are the first stock trope they jump to. World of Warcraft is one of the most egregious examples, with the trolls - blatant racist caricatures with faux-voodoo beliefs, cannibalistic diets, Jamaican accents, and a history of being killed in droves by (white) elves and humans - being raided and slaughtered in nearly every expansion.

It doesn't matter how vibrant and distinctive the real-world indigenous, Polynesian, Caribbean, and African cultures are. It doesn't matter how much potential these real civilizations offer for complex and sympathetic characterization. Anything that doesn't make sense to the white western mind is shoved under the same "savage" umbrella. They're different. They're strange. They're scary. They have to be escaped, subjugated, eliminated, ogled at from the safety of a museum.

Modern writers, directors, and developers don't even seem to realize how horrifying it is to present the indigenous inhabitants of a place as "obstacles" for non-native protagonists to overcome. "It's not racist," they say, "because these people aren't really people, you see." And if you dare to point out anything that hurts or offends you as a descendant of the bastardized culture, you're accused of being the real racist: "These aren't humans! They're monsters! Are you saying that these real societies are just like those disgusting monsters?"

No, they're not monsters. But you chose to design them as monsters, just as invaders have done for hundreds of years. Why would you do that? Why can you recognize any other caricature as evil and cruel, but not this?

This is how deep colonialism runs.

[quasi-normalcy]

[samwwise]

lord of the rings + love

[vulpixelates]

i know it will never happen but i so desperately desire an origins-type playable backstory thing in all games but especially veilguard. i feel like it added so much depth to origins and made you feel instantly connected to your character in a way that gets lost in games like inquisition where you fill in the blanks as you go except for the bare basics. like, i do enjoy the freedom to willy nilly decide where a character was before the events of the story from a creative perspective, but the playable origins were just so good! especially when you go back to where your warden is from and can engage differently with the arcs there