#silent progress

[theluckygirlblog]

You’re Not Stuck—You’re Loading: Why It Feels Like Nothing’s Changing (But Everything Is)

Have you ever felt like you’re stuck in the same place year after year—working hard, dreaming big, and still wondering when things will finally click? If you’re nodding your head, you’re not alone. There’s a silent frustration that many ambitious people carry: the sense that life is moving in circles, that effort isn’t yielding visible results, and that dreams seem just out of reach. It’s the…

[cheerfullycatholic]

I'm getting tired of seeing posts and videos of people in the trad community saying that cooking/baking is a skill girls (only girls) should be taught. Everyone needs to eat and it feels like such a disservice to not teach your boys how to make food, both to the boys but also to the girls they may marry in the future if that's their calling

[honeymoonsimmer]

gardenias on the tile, where it makes no difference who held back from who

[tapeworrmart]

Rip to this slutty wip version of Pyramid Head before I put his clothes on 😔 (ignore James. He's fine.)

[thenerdperson]

I got this 12×36 canvas from a sale and am planning what to do so this is what I got so far, what do yall think?

I traced the master sword and flowers from the official stuff, but it's dragon zelda that's important to figure out

[satanfemto666]

El progreso que hice éste año :) todavía me falta llegar a lo que quiero pero espero seguir mejorando

[anghraine]

I'm trying to redirect my political thoughts from my fandom escape blog again, but I found something interesting enough that I thought I'd talk a little about it.

Occasionally I choose suffering (looking at the more granular 2024 exit poll breakdowns rather than the summaries that I mostly don't trust much at this point). Anyway, I did find something intriguing, if not particularly surprising, in the CNN exit polls, which were done in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin with a sample size of 22,914 voters.

(I mention the specific states forming the sample because this pretty notably excludes any blue states while including some reliably Republican ones.)

Anyway, most exit polls including CNN's let respondents identify their place on the US political spectrum: conservative, moderate, or liberal (reminder that "liberal" in US usage can be a pejorative for "less leftist than me" but also a shorthand for "radical leftist" but also for "anyone who doesn't seek a cishet white Christian ethnostate", but also can be a more neutral synonym for progressives and/or leftists and is often used that way, as here). So you can look at the election results for each of these ideological factions and what share of the overall sample size they represent.

The interesting thing: this "liberal" category accounted for very similar proportions to 2020 of the overall vote in the sample (24% in 2020, 23% in 2024—a difference well within the margin of error of exit polling). There is no need to explain liberals/leftists staying home in 2024: at least in terms of proportions of the overall electorate, they didn't. Just under 1/4 of voters in 2024 were liberals or leftists, just as in 2020.

Okay, if the most leftwards faction of the US political spectrum actually formed a similar proportion of the electorate, then who did they vote for?

Harris. In CNN's own exit polls from 2020, 89% of this faction voted for Biden, and (surprisingly!) a full 10% voted for Trump. God knows what motivated that 10% Trump share after four years of his hellscape of an administration at the height of COVID, but in any case, that support cratered in 2024. 91% of this group voted for Harris and only 4% for Trump. It's an estimate, but it looks like these very peculiar Trump voters had enough of him in 2024 and around half either voted third party this time or for Harris.

So which faction is Trump's victory coming from? Further consolidation of the far right?

In part, yes! 90% of conservatives voted for Trump in 2024, vs 85% in 2020—likely, some conservatives who voted third party or even for Biden in 2020 came "home" this year. However, conservative turnout was actually a little down in 2024, proportionally speaking: conservatives dropped from 38% of the sample in 2020 to 34% in 2024.

But there's one more major faction in all this: "moderates" or centrists. To be clear, we're talking about the US version of centrism, given that this is a US organization polling US voters about US politicians, not "Bernie would be center-right in Denmark" or whatever. This moderate faction jumped from 38% of the overall sample in 2020 to 42% in 2024, and they swung hard towards Trump, though Harris still won a plurality of them. In 2020, 64% of moderates voted for Biden vs 34% for Trump. In 2024, 57% of them voted for Harris vs 40% for Trump—that is, the Democratic lead among centrists dropped precipitously from +30 to +17.

Tl;dr—ideologically speaking, this data suggests that Trump owes his victory to gains among both right-wing and centrist voters rather than some faction of would-be leftists or progressives apathetically staying home or voting third-party or otherwise deserting Democrats (because they're insufficiently radical or for any other reason).

Oh, and if you're curious as to how this compares to CNN's 2016 exit polls, I also checked those! Harris's 84-point lead among the most leftwards faction is a significant improvement from HRC's 74-point lead in 2016. Trump also got 10% of that group in 2016, as in 2020, so it's this campaign—not Hillary's or Biden's—that managed to eat into whatever the hell is going on with that group.

Harris's +17 with moderates is actually a slight improvement on Hillary's +12 in 2016. Biden's jump to a +30 lead among centrists in 2020 represented either a backlash against Trump from centrists, or Biden's own rapport with that group, or some mysterious issue some of those voters had with both HRC and Harris (I wonder what it could be!!), or some combination thereof. Regardless, there are a lot of actual ideologically centrist voters in the USA and not just would-be leftists who haven't heard the good news of Marx yet. And Trump has an iron grip on the right wing at this point: he beat Hillary with conservatives by +65 in 2016, then beat Biden with an even larger margin of +71, then leapt to a 81-point lead over Harris with right-wing voters this year.

[escapefromthedeal]

COMING SOON

(Yes, I'm back 💜)

[thirdity]

Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good?

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

[jaarrouge]

just wip

[mochiri]

Makoto and Sousuke's Identity outside of Haru and Rin at the end of Free!

I've seen some people say they're a bit reluctant to finish the Final Stroke because Makoto becomes sidelined. Though, I did want to point out that Makoto's developed career ambitions at the end of the Final Stroke ends up being a beautiful closure to his insecurities and worries that actually start in High Speed! Starting Days.

Makoto, why do you swim?

Makoto in Starting Days, has his entire world turned upside down because he realizes his entire reason for swimming is because of Haru. But in the Final Stroke, he evolves his meaning of swimming into something that's very Makoto. He develops his own individual identity with swimming by being a coach for both children and for swimmers on the global level. Instead of swimming just for Haru and his friends, Makoto evolves his relationship to swimming to something he identifies better with. Which is connections with people and the ability to support them emotionally, physically, and mentally.

In relation (because Makoto and Sousuke are direct parallel characters as the best friends of RinHaru), Sousuke's own motivations for swimming is related to Rin (I don't want to say he directly swims because of Rin like Makoto does for Haru). But Rin is Sousuke's motivation enough to overwork his entire body, transfer schools, sacrifice himself to just swim one last race with Rin... Because Rin's motivation is friends and Sousuke doesn't really understand that at first as someone who always thought you're alone in the water.

But at Sousuke's "end" he actually learns to form connections OUTSIDE of Rin. Because sousuke throughout his entire arc tries to learn about what friendship means to him and how that can develop you as a person.

when he does rehab with Nao and Makoto they help him specialize in other strokes, remind him not to overwork his body, refine his swimming skills and overall he became a better swimmer through the connections he made and not alone like he always thought. Sousuke learning the power of friendship through Momo, Nitori, Makoto, Nao + the others in Tokyo.

So... Summarizing it all up:

Makoto whose original motivations to swim is Haru, develops an identity to swimming outside of Haru. And then makes it his own by adding his caring and nurturing personality through coaching.

Sousuke, whose original ambitions to swimming is individuality, competitiveness, and Rin, develops a relationship to swimming through connections and friends outside of Rin.

Makoto uses swimming to solidify and create bonds while Sousuke’s is the opposite where he realizes bonds are what can solidify his swimming.

Here's other related analysis about these swimming boys i care too much about:

Makoto and Sousuke as parallel characters

How Makoto uses backstroke to solidify bonds

Free! color theory (contains another soumako parallel lolol)

[yukkue]

I didn’t draw much lately so eh have a wip

I like this one so I might finish

[ceramicteapot]

something heavy sits in your chest every time you anticipate someone is mad at you. there's no raised voices, no accusations, just radio silence.

you try to sit with your discomfort and find that it comes from a decade ago- from when your mother would refuse to talk to you, when your father would not say anything as you cried your eyes out, when your sibling ignored your plight despite knowing how much it all clawed deep within you. it would have dug your intestines out if it could.

so now, every time a friend goes silent, a teacher ignores your mail, a colleague doesn't show up when they should, a boss doesn't tell you what you ought to be doing, you feel like the worst person in the world.

so you reach out into the void for forgiveness that isn't there, for love you were never shown, for peace you never felt. you wonder how long you can finally go on living like this. would it be long enough?

[theoretically-writing-fics]

If the theory that Elder Faerie is Silent Salt becomes true I might just cry

[soltheinkwizard]

2021 vs 2025

this was originally a meme redraw but for the life of me I can't find the original image. I definitely improved a lot even when drawing shitpost haha

[attemptingfate]

she is my shayla