#so it's harder to ignore now

[menlove]

lots of talk rn about how fucked up the US education system is rn (like "8th graders not knowing the first 7 letters of the alphabet regardless of income/ability" fucked up) w lots of reasons given like covid, lack of parent engagement, "kids these days being lazy", etc. and while i definitely think at least the first two have impact on the situation

mostly i'm just like....... all of these things people are pointing out is problems that low SES teachers & students have been pointing out for decades. these are problems that students have been struggling with for decades in low SES schools. and now that it's applying to rich white kids too people are talking about it. but it has always been a fundamental flaw and issue in our schooling system. and the biggest issue here is, imo, that we are living in late stage capitalism & our school system was NOT built to handle a single thing going on rn. just like it wasn't built for lower-class students to thrive. the problem is now most households and schools are facing the same issues these lower SES households and schools have always faced.

but it's just a little wild bc for years the concerns and problems that teachers and students in lower SES schools have brought up have been routinely ignored and brushed aside and these students just got pushed along and the schools kept getting less funding and no one bothered to try and fix it so now we have a crisis bc it's happening everywhere

[seventh-district]

Making Incorrect H:SR Quotes Until I Run Out of (hopefully) Original Ideas - Pt. 3 - Random Screenshot Edition

[Pt. 1] [Pt. 2] [Pt. 4] [Pt. 5] [Pt. 6]

[worstloki]

Mu Qing ascending is objectively so funny considering Feng Xin and Xie Lian also do. Out of the people in your kingdom who accomplished immortality there’s this guy who used to be your servant but is now on equal rank to you and he‘s super rude now and also thinks you hate him because he remembers when you were 18 and lacked socioeconomic-interpersonal awareness

[fuckinart]

(they'll never understand) How could I ever understand? No, I don't have to understand. I don't wanna understand. So I will never understand. (we could have everything)

[the-somwthing]

Welcome to my little meta analysis essay called

Why do we misremember Flower Husbands as being “nicer” than it was?

Disclaimer: I’m not here to talk about whether or not FH is “toxic” or anything like that. It’s just a fact that many old fans rewatching FH POV and new fans who are watching it for the first time after seeing fan content tend to be surprised at how they actually behaved in the series compared to how everyone remembered them being back in the day. This will NOT go over whether or not I think FH is unhealthy or whatever and instead just discuss why I believe this phenomenon has happened.

So, if I try to make this a fancy well written essay, I’ll be here all day, so I’ll just get to the point. 3rd Life came out during the DSMP era of mcyt. MCRP has been around for ages, but the DSMP style of RP (which I’ll be calling “smp rp”) was pretty much popularized by DSMP, mostly towards the end of 2020. For reference, 3rd Life started early 2021, so there’s about a half a year between these two events, and DSMP kept going for years so 3rd Life was absolutely happening during the golden era of DSMP.

But what does DSMP have to do with this? Well, it sort of created this idea of “lore” and only specific things being “canon”. You can make fun of me for the way I worded that, but you know what I mean, DSMP was weird about that stuff. I don’t really blame them as it was kind of a new style of RP they accidentally spawned, but still, it was a confusing time for SMPs.

3rd Life was actually less like DSMP and more like the modern SMP RPs, where there’s no (known, lol) scripted events and the fandom itself deciphers what is or isn’t “canon” rather than it being told to them, with mostly everything being considered canon. HOWEVER, I do believe that DSMP’s style did still affect the fandom, specifically with the topic of this essay, Flower Husbands.

But why would it only really affect Flower Husbands? Now we get into a rough topic: shipping discourse. Back in those days, shipping in the mcyt fandom was heavily frowned upon. Moreso than it is today (I know it’s still around, but it was a lot worse the earlier we go lol). I’ve even seen old relics of ppl saying flower husbands should only be portrayed as platonic cuz it’s wrong to ship them, despite their team name literally being husbands. But more importantly, for A LOT of people, flower husbands was the One Ship people felt “allowed” to ship, BECAUSE it was canon. So they would allow FH and shun every other ship.

My point isn’t actually that, with it being the only “acceptable” ship everyone tried to make it more wholesome, though I suppose that could be a contributor. But my ACTUAL point is where all the things I laid out finally close in on each other:

Ships were a Dangerous territory in mcyt fandom, and ships being “canon” was something a lot of people weren’t prepared to deal with. People don’t want to get too close to RPF territory, but back in the day their ideas of c! vs cc! wasn’t as great, so they default to the DSMP Rule of “if it’s stated to be roleplay, then it’s canon to the characters, if not, it’s noncanon and just the CCs hanging out”.

You see where I’m going with this? When trying to follow this rule for a character relationship where they don’t explicitly state what is or isn’t RP, they hear “we’re married” and instantly mark that as canon to the characters since it clearly isn’t true to the CCs, and tend to block out anything else, otherwise you’re risking it not actually being true to the characters. Especially when it’s things like Scott saying something mean about Jimmy; that directly contradicts the “these characters are in love” thing, so it must not be canon, right?

But wouldn’t people still remember that these things happened, or did they actually straight up not process any of it? My answer to that is: of course everyone was paying attention, but with the context that it’s the CCs playing a video game, all of the teasing and other behavior seems WAY less serious. It just looks like average friends playing a hunger games smp together. And as I explained earlier, the fandom was ONLY processing this as a CC thing, so Scott’s treatment of Jimmy never stood out because that’s just how it is playing games.

Back to DSMP, I’m not active in that fandom anymore but I’ll see snippets sometimes, and I’ve seen the claim that beeduo was actually boring in canon and the fandom was the one that made it interesting. I feel like this is exactly what happened with FH. Nobody was actually expecting anyone to go hard into romantic roleplay, so the fans just take whichever pair says they’re getting married and fill in the blanks themselves. And that was normal back then, it wasn’t fans making stuff up for no reason, it was kind of expected of us.

So yeah, I personally believe that this whole confusion about FH is a result of its time. Whether you want to finally look at the actual substance of the relationship rather than following weird rules about what is or isn’t “canon”, or you believe that since FH was from a time where romantic RP was confusing and weird it would make the most sense to take into account the time period it came from and ignore the less appealing bits in favor of the fanon, I don’t really care honestly. But man isn’t this an interesting situation.

[zehina]

I am not cut out to be a writer, never was. I don't have a consistent schedule, and the weight of wanting to provide for those few who enjoy my writing crushes me eventually.

I don't know why I decided to be one.

[ramenwithbroccoli]

okay i'm done 💥💥💥💥

when i first heard the name of @boneinator 's new bot, Rosetta, i thought of those big, rose-like colorful glass windows (their name in polish is 'rozeta', so it's pretty similar). that's why i couldn't get the idea of a stained glass" piece out of my head. so here it is :]

[iliveinprocrasti-nationn]

I deeply appreciate your post about Flaco. I'm really angry that he's dead. I hope the people who were celebrating his "freedom" from captivity will learn from this. It really made me sick to see people supporting a life for Flaco that they wouldn't even choose for themselves. He was restricted at the zoo, but he was safe and cared for. People willingly accept restrictions all the time for safety and care.

I think a lot of it comes from people not understanding how animal care works and how animals live in captivity when zoos are fully licensed and focused on proper animal care. To be fair, I haven’t been to the Central Park Zoo where he’d been housed, but it looks pretty reputable. He would have had proper food, stimulation/enrichment, and care had he not been released or had been recaptured and returned. It’s misunderstandings at best and intentional ignorance at worst that leads to these situations. And I especially don’t want people to forget that this wasn’t just an escaped animal who died; this was a nonnative species who got out because people purposefully vandalised his enclosure, and it was uninformed but still intense public opinion which lead to him not being recaptured. Maybe it’s because I’m angry and because I’ve been saying this would happen since the beginning, but I place a portion of the blame on anyone who refused to do more research and instead advocated against recapture

[imminent-danger-came]

tbh you are so real for talking about the misogyny targeted to mei & other women in the lmk fandom. in general its like people only value mei as: a: the wingman to some basic mlm ship or b: macaque 2.0. its honestly crazy how so many male side characters overshadow her in the fanbase despite not even having a FRACTION of her screen time. idk chat i feel like the reason people dont care about mei but care about some random male side/background character is less because they're inherently more likeable but because some of you view women as inherently less likable. and everyone is always like "mei is so girlboss pussy cunt slay shes the only reason theyre still alive because she keeps them safe from their silly boy shennanigans shes their ultimate wingman shes so badass shes their lesbian best friend i totally paid attention to her when i watched this show LOL" and even ignoring the obvious misogyny here (ie. how people reduce her to being the male characters babysitter) its like... okay... i know mei is cool & badass already... could you name literally ANY other character trait she has. like people just value her as being "the braincell" who can get red son and mk together or something stupid and its like are we having fun still is this still fun. literally every day i go into the mei tag its like "look at mei shes red sons wifey and shes vaguely in the background of this drawing of red son and mk staring into each others eyes #trafficlighttrio am i right oh look shes macaques niece now this post is about ao lie why is it in the mei tag"

and thats literally JUST talking about mei and it doesnt even begin to cover the other female characters. chang'e constantly gets reduced to being red sons aunt/mom/big sister despite them like. not having any actual interactions in the show. lady bone demon constantly gets overshadowed by her minion who has like 2 seconds of screen time, or she gets made into a cartoonishly abusive madwoman who people call lady bitch demon. just in general people act like shes a horrible person for like. being a villain. liks yeah the trying to destroy everything was bad but also she was an antagonist and thats what antagonists do LOL. spider queen gets completely ignored. princess iron fan gets made into a cartoonishly abusive mother so that way red son can have a poor angsty backstory and some male character (usually nezha, macaque, swk) can take care of him.

(also theres just a great deal of ethnocentrism in the lmk fanbase? like im white so take what İ say here with a grain of salt but so many people will misconstrue aspects of chinese culture for their own personal hcs. people will say male characters are transfem or nonbinary while completely ignoring the time period/culture their from where thats the norm. like yippee youve implied that an east asian man is feminine/emasculine because he has long hair. how do you not see the negative connotations with this. people also turn pif (& lbd to an extent) into a dragon lady which obviously has negative racial connotations lol.)

anyway this is where my unhinged rambling ends have a good day have a good night İ had more to say here but İ reached the text limit. İ dont see a lot of people talk about the misogyny thats prevalent in the lmk fanbase so İm glad youre pointing it out lol.

Yeah, I totally hear you. The lmk fandom has plenty of issues with misogyny and, like you said, ethnocentrism. It's definitely something worth having a discussion about, along with these issues in fandom as a whole.

[foxgloveinspace]

Thinking myself in circles about my ‘New’ Sleep Token Theory, so I might as well make a king as HECK post about it right?? It’s been a while since I’ve made one of these but I really feel like I cracked it this time lmao:

Sleep, Vessel and Vessel behind the mask (who if mentioned again, I will lovingly refer to as [REDACTED]) are one in the same (yes yes obviously Vessel and [REDACTED] are the same already). I have many reasons for thinking this, but I don’t know what y’all will call too much speculation so I’ll keep it to myself.

There is no Lore. There are themes placed on things that Vessel has decided to express through music. (He’s working through some shit). As he has said, ‘all I’ve ever given is a peek into my mind’ (paraphrasing rn cause I’ll start crying if I don’t). There is no real ‘story’, it’s just what Vessel has decided to make music about, themed in religions and religious metaphors.

Which comes to my number one reason for saying the first bit: if Vessel is expressing himself through music, how is it tokens for sleep? Sleep is Vessel. They are ‘tokens’ for Vessel. These are tokens of things Vessel has needed to work through, make music about, to feel things about in a ‘safe’ way. It sounds much more like a token to Vessel then to Sleep.

[cadrenebula]

Vierapril - Day 12 Progress

We all have a tendency to avoid our weaknesses. When we do that, we never progress or get any better.

[mahoushojoe]

i think the genius vs hard worker thing with neji was kind of dumb bc like. its not a dichotomy with neji. like his talent at being a ninja never made it straight up easy for him? like he still canonically worked incredibly hard and overcame a lot of challenges institutional and otherwise to become "the strongest genin in konoha" so like. idk. like of course he did have the advantages of a powerful kekkai genkai and was naturally talented but naruto vs neji makes it seem like a "hard work vs natural ability" thing when neji a) worked incredibly hard actually to master the hyuga jutsus that were forbidden to him, just recreating them On His Own through observing his uncle and then practicing really fucking hard with tenten, and b) naruto didnt even fucking win through hard work???? he won because he has a convenient store of infinite chakra? ULTIMATELY BECAUSE OF WHO HE WAS BORN AS (minato and kushina's son)? so like???? its so fucking stupid lol. like naruto vs neji is framed as this Elitist vs Underdog fight and like. idk. that framing is soooo unfair when you get down to it because it's ultimately "systematically oppressed kid who worked hard but was helped by being talented" vs "inherited human nuke"

[skitskatdacat63]

2009 European Grand Prix - Rubens Barrichello(ft. Lewis Hamilton & Kimi Räikönnen)

[ganondoodle]

seeing all that hatred for art and artists, so many just taking it all for granted, while watching the only websites that were bearable get burned to the ground, just as the world dies slowly around us while fascism rises up in every corner

how are you supposed to not give up on everything

[floral-hex]

ayyyyyyy I set up an appointment for medication this Friday (telemedicine but whatever) and I get to see my former therapist again later this month. I’m kind of excited. More than kind of. Little sad, but I’m lonely and want to talk to someone. He’s a real cool dude. I’m a little worried to trauma dump the last 6 months on him, but whatever, it beats sitting there for an hour feeling like I’m wasting his time and struggling to think of things to say. dang dang dang, I’m excited.

[anxiously-going]

New mantras: "My intelligence is not based on people's (perceived) assumptions of my knowledge." And "I have value beyond my intellect."