#we all have problems

[euesworld]

"Walking down the street, I see so many people in need.. it's crazy how many people in the world need help. But in a crazy world like this, it's hard to tell who really needs it.. there are shifters and grifters all about. There are people with problems, and some with so much more than that.. there is kindness around every corner, people smiling.. you can hear their laughs. There are people that are angry, people consumed with sadness.. and people oblivious to it all. Who's to say who needs the help? Really now? Which ones are the one's that truly need help? It's hard to say, cause I think we could all use a little help now and again.."

Everyone has their time of need, it's up to us to be their humanity.. we are all in this together - eUë

[avatarkv]

the barbie/oppenheimer ask was my hc of what I imagined jake&readers dynamic would be like if “Every Corner of this House Is Haunted” was in a modern world! (I also agree Jake would wanna see Barbie, I just needed to keep up with the sad tone of the story (jakes gotta disappoint Y/N somehow🤷🏽‍♀️))

THE GASP I RELEASED AT THE (jakes gotta disappoint y/n somehow) YALL DONT WANT HER HAPPY FR.

but to make it sadder, if we were talking about every corner of this house is haunted ! jake, he'd probably make reader watch oppenheimer with them instead because he thinks you'd rather want that (despite dropping enough hints that you wanted to see barbie with him and neytiri) but considering the reader, she'd probably suck it up and watch it anyway.

[theriu]

Earlier reblog felt too antagonistic, gonna make my own post with my bit I most wanted to share.

History DOES repeat itself if we don't pay attention; humans then and humans now are all still humans, we're all still capable of making the same mistakes. Great atrocities can occur again if we lose sight of mercy and grace. Demonizing the “other side” (political, religious, ideological, whatever) and treating them as a Great Evil that Needs To Be Killed is a slow creep that can turn into a mudslide straight to horrible violence. Please be mindful of how you react to (and treat) others who disagree with you—every cruel person feels justified in their cruelty. It's better to simply not be cruel.

[thediktatortot]

Someone re-blogged that vent post with tags calling me entitled for what I was saying and you know what? Yes, I am entitled to my opinion on that post- I have been in fandom for more than half my life! Why would I feel like I am not entitled to have an opinion on something I have surrounded my life around to a pretty high degree for a LONG ass time?

If you put your all into something like so many of us have, our life, our time, our SKILL...then I’m pretty fucking sure I am entitled to have an opinion on that.

Yes. People will like what they want to like. They will like it for the amount of time they like it for and they will move on as quick or as fast as they move on from it.

But that does not give you all the right to say to those of us who put our fucking ALL into the fandoms and all we ask back is that you at least return some of the favor with basic shit like interaction, or even just to pass around the things we work on or TELL people about it!

It’s not about in the end how long you stay in a fandom, it’s how you act, and you go about that fandom that makes it important

You like a show and stay in fandom for two months because your mental health can’t take it for too long? That’s perfectly FINE, but what you do in those two weeks are the important part. Did you go around talking about the thing you enjoy? Did you share are you saw that you liked? Did you, when you were talking to your friends about said fandom, share some fics or headcanons you saw and liked? Did you click like on tumblr on a oneshot or did you also reblog it too?

ITS NOT ABOUT HOW LONG YOU ARE HERE IN FANDOM ITS ABOUT HOW FUCKING GOOD OF A TIME YOU MAKE IT. It’s also NOT just YOU here. It’s ALL of us.

And whenever someone brings up mental health into all this, YES we ALL KNOW. Fandom was MADE and FOSTERED by mostly neurodivergent people! I’m one of them!! We all get burned out. We all get those feelings of RSD or feeling like we can’t interact with people, but it’s not even about that. It’s just about doing the bare fucking minimum to PUT BACK just a tiny bit of effort you can.

Can’t add tags to tumblr reblogs? That’s FINE, don’t add tags! Just reblog shit to your account.

Don’t know what to say on a fic after reading it? That’s OKAY, you can just leave an emoji or a fucking string of ‘aoi;saidaisjds;asdads’ and I’m FUCKING POSITIVE that the writer will LOVE it regardless.

Literally, ANYTHING is better than just wading through the world of fandom collecting shit for yourself that you never pass a long, never ‘pay it back’ for and just hoard and hide and move along.

In the end, you wont have anything hoard after all the fucking people who want to put shit INTO the fandom feel like no one actually gives a fuck and moves on with their lives.

[morallygreyyn]

was at a friend’s house yesterday and they started bashing omegaverse and how all people who read and write it are the scum of the earth and need to be locked up

me, sitting there calmly while thinking of all the omegaverse i’ve willingly consumed, written and thought about and knowing damn well i have a full omegaverse story on the way

damn bruh that’s crazy who could like such a thing

[thiswilldowonderfully]

introducing my friend who hasn't read bsd

[secondbeatsongs]

for anyone too young to know this: watching The Truman Show is a vastly different experience now, compared to how it was before youtube and social media influencers became normal

before it was like, "what a horrifying thing to do to a human being! to take away their autonomy and privacy, all for the sake of profits! to create fake scenarios for them to react to, just to retain viewership! to ruin their happiness just so some corporate entity could harvest money from their very humanity! how could anyone do something so evil?"

and now it's like, "ah, yeah. this is still deeply fucked up, but it's pretty much what every influencer has been doing to their kids for a decade now. probably bad that we've normalized this experience"

[adhdandcomics]

no idea how relatable this is gonna be to the general public but stim toys arent enough anymore i gotta stick to the walls

[trans-axolotl]

saw a post the other day that said that psych survivors were overexaggerating and fearmongering for saying that people should be aware that having diagnoses on your record can be a danger + impede your life. and the more i think about it the more annoyed i am. because i think people need to know that there are exceptions to health privacy laws that can make having psych diagnoses and psych hospitalization history on your record risky depending on your circumstances. diagnoses follow you through your health interactions-you do not have to consent to have your information shared between providers. judicial proceedings are also an exception to the HIPAA privacy rule, so for things like custody battles, guardianship, getting orders of protection--the court can petition for medical records. there's so many other situations where even if they can't legally access your information without your authorization, people will require you to disclose diagnoses, records, previous hospitalizations and refuse to give you services/hire you/whatever unless you share that information with them. for example in many states anyone (a provider, a cop, friends and family) can disclose that you have certain psych diagnoses like bipolar to the DMV which then might require that you undergo drivers license review as frequently as every 3 months. my university is actively trying to kick me out right now because i had to disclose my medical record, psych diagnoses, and hospitalization history to them as a requirement to stay enrolled.

and i don't want to scare people or make people think that having a diagnosis on their records is automatically going to mean that it is weaponized against us. because i do know plenty of people who have never faced issues with their records. but i do expect that the community supports the people speaking out about the ways that we have been harmed by diagnoses creating barriers to accessing necessary parts of our life. instead of attacking us or saying that we're lying about things we are currently experiencing.

[hamletthedane]

Love that Oppenheimer is a deeply disturbing horror movie about a man forced to accept that he is, in a person, the representative manifestation of mankind’s evil in committing one of the greatest horrors of human history - LITERALLY acting as the modern Prometheus, tormented by his sins for the remainder of time. Knowing that he will never be pitied and his actions will forever be utterly unforgivable because the blood of genocide and the potential of total human annihilation will eternally drip from his hands.

But also the simultaneous indictment by the film that to blame a single person for the Manhattan Project is to refuse to accept your own capacity for great evil if the ends ever seem to justify the means, and the culpability of every member of a species that lets itself create something so unspeakably terrible.

Hate that twitter’s take on such a nuanced and brilliantly handled examination of those issues is “movie bad because protagonist not evil enough.”

[rollercoasterwords]

the tiktokification of ao3

or: some of you fundamentally misunderstand ao3 and it really, really shows

i was talking about this with a friend a few days ago and since then i've seen multiple posts of various sorts that have just made me think about it more, so. here is me breaking down a disconnect i see particularly with younger members of the marauders fandom (i say marauders specifically just bc that's the only one i'm plugged into):

okay, so i've seen many (usually younger) marauders fans either talking online about how they wish ao3 was more like social media (specifically regarding algorithms) OR talking about ao3/fanfiction/fanfic writers as if they are operating under the same etiquette/guidelines/assumptions they would bring into social media platforms. this ranges from being mildly irritating to genuinely harmful, and i want to talk abt why.

first - you have to understand that social media, in this day and age, exists in a profit economy. and when i say social media here, i'm referring to platforms like tiktok, twitter, instagram, etc. all of these platforms exist in a profit economy where content is a product that can be monetized. this leads to a few important distinctions:

people posting on these social media platforms are generally posting with the intent to get their content seen by as many people as possible, as quickly as possible

they post with this intent because once their content is consumed by enough people, it becomes a product that they can monetize

therefore, if that content gets popular enough, these people can become influencers, where content creation is an actual job and their audience are, in a sort of vague and obscured way, similar to consumers purchasing a product

because of the profit economy surrounding social media, there are certain assumptions + forms of interaction that bleed across almost all social media platforms. the ones relevant to this little essay include:

operating under the assumption that anyone posting anything on the internet wants to go viral, ie. be seen by as many people as possible as quickly as possible in order to grow an "audience"

these influencers are creating content for us, their audience, so they should want to please us. they should also be trying to appeal to the broadest possible audience. therefore, if we dislike their content, we have a right to make that very, very clear.

in that same vein, we have a general right to critique content creators, as they are making a profit and we are the consumers purchasing their product--much like you might feel entitled to a certain standard of service in a restaurant where you are paying for the food.

when you carry these assumptions over to a platform like ao3, it creates problems. why? in a nutshell: because ao3 exists outside the profit economy

ao3 is a non-profit. it does not have an algorithm because it is not trying to sell you anything. this means that the writers posting their work on ao3 are not making a profit. we are not influencers. we are not creating monetized content to sell to a consumer-audience. where consuming content on other social media platforms might be comparable to eating at a restaurant, reading fanfiction on ao3 is more like coming over to someone's house and eating cookies that they made for free. you are in their house. the cookies are free, given as a gift. so what happens when those assumptions outlined above start to bleed over from other social media?

assuming that anyone posting fanfiction online wants their work to go viral -- i've seen this with popular fic writers getting questions like, "are you worried x isn't going to be as popular as y?" those questions are usually not ill-intended, but they demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding about why writers post work on ao3. it's not to go viral. it's not to build any sort of online following. most of us who post on ao3 have jobs or schoolwork or other commitments, and writing fanfiction is something done for fun, out of a love for writing. those sharing their work online might be seeking community, but that is fundamentally different from seeking an audience, and in no way involves internet virality. if someone is posting fanfic on ao3 with the hope that it'll "go viral," then they likely either won't continue writing fanfic for long or will reach a point where they have to re-evalute their motivations, because seeking joy and validation by turning your art into a product for consumption just isn't very sustainable.

influencers are creating content for us, so we have a right to let them know if we don't like it -- nope!! fic writers are not influencers. yes, even the popular ones. no matter how much other people might blow their work up on social media, fic writers are still outside the profit economy. they are not creating content for an audience. they are not creating content for you. they are writing because they love it, and they are generously sharing it. if you don't like it, don't interact with it. you are never entitled to loudly and publicly proclaim how much you dislike a fic. i talk about this more here

we have a general right to critique fic writers, the same way we do with content creators/influencers -- again, no. you should not be treating fic writers the way you would treat an influencer on another social media platform, no matter how popular they may be. this is not to say fic writers are beyond all reproach; rather, it is a call-in to check your entitlement. fic writers are not little jesters entertaining in your court. they are not subject to your whims. they do not have to do things for you. they do not have to write things you like. in that post i linked on point 2, i talk about what etiquette might look like if you're really concerned that a fic writer is doing something harmful, but that is not what i'm talking about here. i am talking about the proliferation of negativity i have seen, especially on twitter and tiktok, where people essentially just talk shit about fics or fic writers as though they are entitled to have those fic writers working to please them. this is gross, and it needs to stop. you wouldn't go over to someone's house, eat the cookies they baked to share, and then spit those cookies back in their face and start shouting about what a shitty baker they are. or maybe you would--in which case, congratulations! you are Not A Good Person.

anyway, at the end of the day, a lot of this can be boiled down to: Because ao3 exists outside the profit economy, fic writers are not influencers, and you should never be treating them as though they are. i think i see this disconnect largely with younger people just because they've maybe only ever really understood social media within this sort of influencer-consumer-culture economy, and genuinely don't understand how to interact differently with the internet. so, consider this post a call-in to reevaluate the way you interact with fic writers and the etiquette you use when it comes to engaging with fanfic on ao3! i promise that ao3 being different from social media is a very, very good thing, and also a very, very rare thing, so let's treasure it and focus on fostering community rather than trying to morph it to fit the mould of influencer-audience dynamics that we see almost everywhere else <3

[egophiliac]

(almost) four years in, and I finally had time to draw something for the anniversary! woo! 🎉🎉🎉

[sonknuxadow]

its kinda funny that the chaotix are like the only characters who mention having to pay rent or buy food or whatever and theyll take any job that pays because theyre desperate for money but none of the other characters are struggling in this department at all even though most of them dont seem to have jobs. its like the concept of needing money to live exists for no one in the sonic universe EXCEPT for vector espio and charmy

[florimead]

Starting up a Mental Health Monday VC in my discord. Sometimes talking about your problems with strangers on the internet can be cathartic. I'll be online at 6pm cst if you wanna chat and need some help. (FYI: not a substitute real therapy)

[homoqueerjewhobbit]

A lot of Christians read A Christmas Carol and gloss right over the "pay workers a living wage" message and take away "not being merry on Christmas is a cardinal sin" instead.

[livwritesstuff]

Steve is home one day with his daughters when he realizes that his oldest, Moe, is ten.

Okay, obviously, he knew she was ten. She’s been ten for a while, as her birthday is in July and it’s now December, and the girls are discussing Christmas as they perceive it in their little girl worlds.

It’s really that Steve realizes that Moe is the same age Erica had been when he’d asked her to climb through air ducts and infiltrate a Russian military base.

It’s a realization that has Steve feeling a little nauseous, because Moe is ten and she’s plotting with her little sisters about how they’re going to stay awake on Christmas Eve to catch a glimpse of Santa (their conspiring has Steve worried for his and Ed’s own role in Christmas Eve and the way it hinges on the girls falling asleep as early as fucking possible), and she’d lost another baby tooth this morning and hasn’t stopped talking about what the tooth fairy might leave for her overnight, and she still sneaks into his and Eddie’s room after nightmares looking for snuggles, and she’s afraid of car washes and bugs, and she still wants to be read to before bed every night.

He’d been struck suddenly by how little Moe still is. Maybe he’s only thinking that because she’s his daughter – his first daughter, at that – but he still looks at that kid’s face and sees the newborn baby who’d made him a dad ten years ago.

He can’t imagine looking at her and seeing someone equipped to take on Erica had been asked to do, never mind actually asking her to do it, which is precisely what Steve had done twenty-five years ago.

It eats at him for the rest of the day.

“Just call her, Steve,” Eddie urges him after Steve brings it up for the sixth time that evening, “You clearly need to air this shit out.”

So Steve calls Erica.

Erica is in her mid-thirties now. She’s a kick-ass lawyer at a private firm in Indiana, and she picks up the phone on the second ring.

“This is Erica,” she says.

“Hey, it’s Steve.”

“What’s up,” she replies, still never one for beating around the bush.

“I just – I need to apologize.”

“For what?”

“For Scoops,” Steve says, “For Starcourt.”

Erica is silent for a while.

None of them really talk about any of that stuff anymore. They’d hashed everything out ages ago, until all that was left behind was the understanding that none of them would ever be able to truly move past it, that there would always be guilt and fear and pain they could never shake.

“Okay?” she finally says, question in her tone.

“I just…” Steve hesitates, “Look – I didn’t get it. I didn’t fully get how fucked up it was. I was the grown up in the situation and I should have put a stop to it but I was stupid and reckless, and now that Moe is ten, I can’t stop thinking about how insane it was for us to even consider roping you into that.”

“I agreed to it.”

“You were a kid.”

“You were a kid,” Erica insists.

“Eighteen isn’t a kid anymore.”

“Say that to me again when Moe’s eighteen and maybe I’ll believe you.”

Steve doesn't have anything to say to that, because Erica is probably right (though only time will tell, he supposes). Their phone call ends only a few minutes later with Erica telling him to go easy on himself and Steve saying he’d try before apologizing one more time.

“You gonna take her advice?” Eddie asks after he’s pulled a begrudging Steve into his arms.

“No,” he tells him, curling into his husband’s side and sticking his nose in Eddie’s neck so he doesn’t have to look him in the eye.

“Figures.”