#im sorry for this meme but i am right

[bklily]

What? Never kissed your pals goodbye?

[nonbinarylesbianherb]

to all the rhaenicent haters out there.. I love rhaenicent very dearly.. does anyone want to start like an enemies to lovers arc with me

[tempesttz]

how being in the same place as anti endos feels sometimes:

this is kind of hard to read due to the gray (my eyes are little light sensitive babies) and the tiny text so transcription below:

endogenic plural: "hey! i'm plural, like you, but in a different way! i would like to compare our experiences as we share a similar niche phenomenon and may be able to help each other out! isn't that cool?" anti endo: "well you'll never truly be able to understand how we feel as traumagenic systems because we never chose to be a system and you did and the fact that you use terms that we created as if your plurality and my plurality are the same is honestly disgusting even if it works the way that you claim you're encroaching on our communities and the concept that we are anything alike will NEVER be true. you will never understand how i feel you encroach on our communities and when we get upset about it you bite back, why do you NEED to exist in our spaces??? us trauma survivors have literal triggers that can be CAUSED by endos, being a trauma survivor means that we might not want to interact with you or validate you as an endogenic while you claim to have the same or similar experiences, our systems are based on trauma and survivial not whatever else you have, sharing community spaces like that is just so inherently wrong, if you truly are formed not by trauma than your experiences will never be like us, im quoting a real person here lmao" endogenic plural: "jesus dude"

[all-thestories-aretrue]

Episode 91 Nara to Neil: Is it because you know, because you know that my affection is a means to an end or do you feel something for Wynn and don't know how to say it?

Episode 95 Neil to Wynn: If this is a moment where there’s a line in the sand about us staying together, you know I’ll follow you to go die.

Episode 91 Neil to Nara: I haven’t known these things maybe for a long time, and so I just sit in inaction because I don’t know.

Episode 95 Narration of Neil by Rob: When Wynn confirms to Britta that she’s in love with Kabir, Neil goes stock still.

[alchemania]

All of your Wanderer and Furina fics hit me right in the feels, I- THEY ARE SO GOOD. "Well SOMEONE has to be [angry]", this broke me. I need to see them interacting in canon now-

AWWW thank you so much! This put a huge smile on my face.

I saw a post on how they have a lot of parallels and my mind just ran from there, honestly.

I'll also admit that Wanderer yelling about being angry came directly from the heart - like after everything was over and said and done, besides Neuvillette deciding that he would make sure Furina would want for nothing; like. No one was angry on her behalf. No one seemed to be horrified by everything she'd suffered through, or taken aback by the weight of everything she endured, on the HOPE that everything would turn out alright. It was out of love, yes, but it hurt and it hurt very badly and Wanderer seemed the perfect candidate to be like "Where is your fury? Where is your righteous anger?" Because that's literally him as a character. Like. Even Shouki no Kami in the descriptions it talks about how he has seen so much SUFFERING, seen people go through so many things and how he understands humans, he has felt their suffering, he LOVES them. Because he's been there.

For him, taking that fury and weaponizing it, that is love. He will take your anger that you refuse to hold, or that is too heavy to, and cling to it like it's his lifeblood. He will stand in front of you and demand answers from the ones who wronged you, stain his hands red out of rage. That's just who he is. Eye for an eye and all that. And so like, with Furina, he sees what all happened to her and he sees that no one is angry or questioning and he's like oh. Okay. Then I Will Do It. He's the one holding up her anger to her like TAKE IT. TAKE IT. IT IS YOURS. IT IS OKAY TO HARBOR!! Do it!!

He's got a bigger heart than he cares to admit and good lord he feels SO strongly. Bro will kill for you if he cares.

[fireflower117]

i am having. thoughts about the dnd campaign im currently in asdfgklkl to be fair i am always having thoughts but today i will be standing on my soapbox to shout about them because im feeling silly✨

ever since i was a kid i always wanted to tell stories. and i dont think thats a strange experience, especially not on this hellsite, but weirdly enough i always found the most joy telling those stories with other people. here’s the thing about that- working with other people on creative stuff is hard. everyone brings their own thoughts and finding a way for everything to gel, much less to feel earning and cohesive and alive is genuinely SO hard. i spent so much time searching for the perfect medium to do it in, the perfect story to tell, but inevitably it always sort of fell apart.

so when i first agreed to join this campaign, i think the thing that struck me the most about it was how much it felt like i was a kid again, telling stories and riffing off each other’s ideas to make some intricate, meaningful whole. i felt it when i was listening to my party members talk about their characters, and then weeks later meeting them in-session for the first time and getting to feel out dynamics; i felt it from the first descriptions of the world we were given, people and placed that were both novel and exciting but also oddly familiar— some of my favourite memories come from a new npc being introduced and someone letting out a knowing gasp and having that “oh shit, i know this person” moment.

i felt it when my dm came up and asked me before the campaign, out of curiosity, what storytelling tropes i would want to see- and then months later i was getting emotionally sucker-punched by a full “dimension 20 Nightmare Forest” moment. i felt it from the first moment i pitched my character and my dm went “i know exactly what to do with him” with such assurance, and even months later im still receiving incredibly potent character insights and in-session payoffs, and having a person I made and put insane amounts of love and care into just be able to exist and be treated with dignity within this world that i’ve grown to see as a living, breathing thing in return. and not for lack of trying, i’ve been lucky enough to find a world that is INSANELY easy to immerse myself in because there’s so much passion put into every nook and cranny that it feels like a place I’ve always known, so. hell yeah for that!

there is a saying that goes ‘in order to receive the rewards of being loved you must undergo the mortifying ordeal of being known’, and sometimes i feel as if collaborative storytelling, dnd— and call it recency bias, but specifically this campaign— is the closest thing i have ever received to true, unfettered love. i think love, to me, has always come from the act of creation. in shared storytelling, in recognising of the heart and soul placed within each narrative choice, in making each other laugh and cry and think and feel. in listening, and understanding, and knowing, and responding. in the ways which that transforms and validates you. in telling a good fucking story.

i am standing on this proverbial soap box, and in this moment i am extending this point to anyone who has ever cared about me enough to create something with me; to my party members, and most of all my wonderful, illustrious dm.

i love you too.

[little--ghost]

getting my 26 geo from Grimm during my randomizer

[ayyponine]

not to be a milennial but harry potter and the prisoner of azkaban really is that bitch....

[cerealmonster15]

im looking at this bit in alhaithams lore again. the mirror thing that gets me every time. !!!!

familiar faces with NO family around and opposites. another genius but in an opposite way. his mirror that helps him see and understand things in this world that he otherwise wouldnt!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! "things that may have otherwise been unfathomable"!!!!!!!!!!! kaveh being in his life. helps him study and understand different people and concepts in ways he would not understand if he didnt have kaveh in his life to study like a bug under a microscope lol!!!!!!!!!!

[widevibratobitch]

well shit

[caffeinatedopossum]

people keep making me think I'm smart and it's fucking with my fundamental understanding that I am simply a Person and I know what I know which is equal to what everyone else knows even when those people specialize in different knowledge than me. Like I had this general trust and respect that everyone knows something I don't and didn't consider that I, in turn, also know things that they do not 🤨 crazy how that works

[always-a-joyful-note]

I've done it. I finished Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint. It's long. It's worth binging. It's...it's everything.

I'm....I...It....I can't articulate anything coherent right now so just...just have some emoji reactions and also memes that I generated during my reading of it.

My two biggest moods during the entire thing:

My second two biggest moods:

Memes (in order of creation):

Me right now?

See you in 3 to 5 business days to spam this blog with a long post because boy do I have thoughts and, yes, I will make it everyone's problem.

[sternbilder]

ok so today I had one of the most fascinating and enlightening discussions maybe of my life and I need to share bc it blew my MIND (warning: long)

here's the context. there is a friend I have. they are a pretty good friend of mine that I've known for many years now and I appreciate them as a person very much. lately I have noticed that they've been texting me fairly frequently. which, from my point of view, is once every couple of days. not because they had something specific to say, but just saying hello or asking how my day was.

I'm sure this was well-intentioned, but this was starting to get a tiny bit grating for me. we just met up in person literally two days ago! and you had texted me not long before that, too! nothing new has happened since then! my day has been quite boring, actually! I thought, in my mind, as I swiped away the notification—and immediately felt like an awful friend.

I knew from past experience that responding to the message would invite an immediate and not easily escapable conversation that, due to my poor multitasking skills, would distract me from work or require me to context switch away from whatever else it was I was doing at the moment—cooking, doing chores, watching TV—and worse, amount to little more than idle chit-chat about the same boring quotidian complaints as usual. I am not one of those people who thinks they're above small talk or don't see its social value, but I found myself thinking, am I the one who is being not normal here in not enjoying having this specific kind of interaction MULTIPLE times a week with the SAME person?

so recently, I've been finding myself routinely avoiding opening this particular friend's messages for fear of hurting their feelings if they saw that I had left them on read for a prolonged period of time. I had even gone so far as to avoid posting in a group chat in which we're both participants so that they don't realize that I have, in fact, been online, just not responding to them, specifically. my hope was that after enough slow responses, this friend would eventually get the hint and give up on trying to maintain a steady steam of conversation, but somehow this has not worked so far.

this was starting to weigh on my conscience. I realized that I will have to eventually fight my conflict-avoidant tendencies and just confront this friend directly, for the sake of both my sanity and our friendship. but how to do this gently? tactfully? without implying that I don't value their friendship or that I perceive them as needy or annoying? that was the tricky question. because I know that my friend isn't doing anything wrong! if anything it is probably me that is weird and antisocial and I probably just need to work on my social skills!

but not wanting to feel like a total asshole and hoping to go in with an informed and reasonable mindset (knowing full well that my understanding of social norms isn't always the keenest), I asked a different group chat for their opinion, hoping to gain some perspective on what boundaries they generally considered normal and acceptable to exercise. I phrased my question thusly:

how many friends* would you say you have where you text on a regular basis (say, multiple times a week) 1:1 just to say hi, about nothing in particular *explicitly a friend, not a family member or SO

y'all. the responses were eye-opening.

there were four people who participated in this discussion, all four of whom were in different camps and had wildly different experiences:

0, and assumed most others were the same

0, but assumed most others were not the same

multiple, and assumed most others were the same

multiple, but assumed most others were not the same

1 was me; in retrospect, I am realizing that because I had assumed that these kinds of interactions were not typical, I had interpreted my friend's gesture as something much more significant than it probably was in their mind, which is to say something that they just happen to do with everyone they know and like—which created a sort of pressure in my mind not to let them down and caused a sense of intense anxiety when I found myself struggling to reciprocate. I am absolutely floored at the revelation that it is apparently normal and common for people to have MULTIPLE friends (not even partners!!! or family!!!) that they are talking to on a constant ongoing basis at any given time, and at the possibility that I was treating my friend's feelings with kid gloves when it REALLY wasn't that hashtag deep for them.

2 clarified that they never initiate these kinds of chats, but when others initiate with them, they're fairly comfortable with simply letting these kinds of pings go unanswered, assuming the other person will just move on to someone else without taking it personally.

3 confessed to me that they once tried to do something similar with me, and eventually gave up, but had felt a bit hurt and rejected at my lack of enthusiasm, because they assumed that I was doing this with other people, just not them specifically. they sympathized very strongly with my friend.

4 also recalled that they had at one point tried something similar with me, but sort of got that I wasn't one of those people who would be receptive to this style of communication and wasn't particularly bothered by this, agreeing with 2 that the expectation is not that the recipient HAS to respond, and that my friend should probably pay closer attention to the face-saving social cues I was sending by not responding or responding slowly.

but yeah, the takeaway from this conversation is that people's preferences and experiences and expectations when it comes to digital communication are WILDLY varied, and because both communication technology and the social conventions surrounding them are changing CONSTANTLY (just a few examples: are read receipts good or bad? what about typing indicators? online status? are emoji reacts or gifs/stickers an acceptable substitute for an actual reply? group chats vs. 1:1 DMs? synchronicity and formality of various communication methods like email and chat and video? are phone calls are still socially acceptable?) there are either no agreed-on norms or different camps of people have vastly different understandings of what the norms are

among the other highlights/a-ha moments of this discussion:

Friend 4 asked another friend who is even MORE extraverted than they are what their # was and they reported somewhere in the ballpark of 20-40 people in any given week which is absolutely buckwild to me (importantly, all four of us in the original group happen to be software engineers, a class of people notorious for their lack of sociability, so I have no confidence that I have captured a representative sample size even within this particular group—the numbers both 3 and 4 gave were still both in the single digits, though they are definitely the warmest and friendliest of the bunch)

I realized that one difference between me and 3/4 was that we fulfill our social needs quite differently? specifically, I mostly connect with friends over group chats, of which I have a handful that are quite chatty and at least one or two that I'm actively posting in on any given day. I also typically have at least one, often multiple, real-life social plans every week! I am, in fact, very satisfied with my social life, to the point where it is almost maxing out my social quota (especially recently now that I've started dating someone)! but anyway—I find group chats to be my ideal form of day-to-day communication because there's less urgency and pressure for any individual person to contribute if they're not feeling up for it, and ALSO in the case of group chats where at least one member is a straight man (which is the majority of them for me, and I call out straight men only because they are the only demographic I have historically had this issue with) there is less room for platonic interactions to be undesirably misinterpreted as romantic

3/4 expressed that they prefer 1:1 conversations because they feel more personal and they can be more vulnerable about sensitive topics, which I would generally agree with—though in several of my group chats, I personally do feel comfortable enough with all the members to share things about myself with the entire group just by virtue of having known everyone for a long time and having built group camaraderie, but they seemed to not be comfortable with this without having previously established a consistent 1:1 pattern of day-to-day communication (or maybe they meant they were uncomfortable with the group forum itself, even if they were cool with sharing with everyone individually)?

they also expressed that for them, frequent unsolicited checkins and 1:1 attention from a friend would feel exciting/flattering/validating for them, whereas for me it would feel overwhelming, especially if we weren't THAT close

I do use 1:1 DMs also, but for a very different set of use cases: 1) if I haven't caught up with someone in a while (read: weeks or months), in which case we'll often just not text super long and make plans to call or meet in person instead, or 2) if I have something specific to say, like "here's this meme/song/piece of news I think you'd like to see" or "I need advice on X" or "guess what happened that made me think of you" or "I heard X happened, are you OK?"

I found that whereas I have a very clear distinction between communication preferences with a friend (someone I talk to on a regular basis but don't have a constant line of individual communication with) vs. a significant other (more or less willing to do this, unless they preferred not to), such a boundary between a platonic and romantic relationship does NOT exist for all people which boggled my mind

but yes anyway. I am learning so much about the way people view socializing in the digital age and I am so curious to know more and I kind of wish more people talked about this more openly (specifically among friends! because in my experience this is something that is fairly common to sort out explicitly in a romantic context) because I think this is probably the kind of thing that no one talks about because people are either afraid of potentially hurting feelings or everyone is just kind of assuming by default that their takes are universal without realizing that no actually, many people have strong opinions on this that are the polar opposite of theirs

but my gut feeling is that there is a lot of completely unnecessary friction that could just be resolved if only we could agree that it's cool to be more upfront about what our communication preferences are without worrying about that being taken extremely personally by the other party? bc idk, every single person I talked to about this today was like holy shit this was a whole fucking revelation actually, I can't believe I hadn't thought about this before thank you for bringing this up

[xbadnews-a]

woof

[crybaby-writings]

[theannoyingmosquitoinyourroom]

the french revolution be like: