#which is baffling to me

[dhwty-writes]

sometimes i am confronted with the fact that people care and think about me and i am just sitting there trying to incorporate that into my worldview

[kala-mies]

Wouldn't it be cool if we as a fandom could stop inaccurately assigning Jay the role of 'the smart one' or 'the babysitter'. Wouldn't it.

[throwing-roses-into-the-abyss]

I'm going to try to go back to work tomorrow. it's gonna suck - my dad was a volunteer at the museum too, lots of people there knew him, and it's where I last talked to him on the day he had his heart attack. I loved getting to work there with him, seeing my dad during breaks, showing him the things I was doing there, sometimes having lunch together, and I'm really going to miss that, even if we only had that for a few months. but I can't just stay home forever. there's a project that needs finishing, and I need to get out of the house and do other things too.

but I'm really, really not looking forward to this.

[pwurrz]

some of y’all should. go outside. touch some grass maybe.

[inspisart]

dick took the news that a strange thirteen year old broke into his apartment while he was away at the circus pretty well, I gotta say

[tam--lin]

The thing is, you don’t have to have a diagnoses to make simple “unmasking” changes that make your life easier. You don’t even have to self-diagnose! You are not appropriating anyone’s culture or struggles or hijacking anyone’s movement by allowing yourself to sway in line at the grocery store or buying a weighted blanket or using study or household hacks intended for people with ADHD. If you start favoring the needs that make your brain and body unique over the arbitrary norms of society, you’ll be better off, and you’ll be expanding the norms. It’s a win/win.

[qqueenofhades]

The number of white, ostensibly liberal male political pundits insisting that elections in the Biden/post-Dobbs era are just Completely Unpredictable and Wild sure is something, huh.

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

more of the dapper lad! i Cannot get him out of my brain

[dawnscales]

I saw people on twitter talk about how Jack Black and Neil Gaiman are 'good Jews' because they are not 'evil Zionists'. The reason given? They are for a two state solution.

And I don't know how to tell this to none Jewish people kindly but uh.................... that. That's Zionism?

Believing in Palestinians right to have their own State, self determination and the right for a safe home, for education, for a life free of Hamas and Terror in a Two State Deal is Zionism because the other state in this deal???? Is still Israel. it is still a Jewish state. It is still believing in our rights to return and stay in our ancestral homeland.

Being for a two state Solution, for peace and for working together can and is part of being a Zionist !! And also you don't get to call people good or bad Jews that is antisemitic as fuck.

[opens-up-4-nobody]

The x-files jersey devil picture is so precious to me

[dootznbootz]

Fascinating how Polites, the character who is the personification of Odysseus' optimism and is only in 5 songs, is more grieved and appreciated than Eurylochus, a character who is his own person and is in 11 songs.

[ecoterrorist-katara]

Ka/taang: friends-to-lovers or the Friend Zone?

It’s almost axiomatic, in any ATLA shipping discussion, that Ka/taang is the friends-to-lovers ship while Zutara is the enemies-to-lovers ship, and that differences in shipping tastes can be boiled down to whether you prefer FTL or ETL.

My first ship was Percabeth. My biggest ship was Klaine. It took me until Mockingjay to let go of my Gale-and-Katniss-are-childhood-friends rose-tinted goggles and start liking Everlark. I started dabbling in ETL because of Zutara, but I’m incredibly picky about it (do not ask me how many Dramione fanfics made me irrationally, disproportionately mad).

All this to say: as a longtime friends-to-lovers enthusiast, I should theoretically love Ka/taang. But…

My difficulty with Ka/taang as a friends-to-lovers ship boils down to this: Aang and Katara’s friendship was always narratively framed as insufficient, because Aang liked her from the start and always wanted a romantic relationship. And imo that dynamic really colours their entire friendship.

I like to think Aang would’ve been a ride-or-die friend — the type to give up the Avatar State to rescue her, the type to commit ecoterrorism and help her get arrested, the type to make her a flower necklace to cheer her up — even if he didn’t have a crush on her, but I will never know that. We never got to see the pure friendship part of friends-to-lovers, because the spectre of the romantic relationship was always there. Before the last five minutes of the show, Katara’s feelings for Aang range from “plausibly interested” (The Headband, Cave of Two Lovers) to “doesn’t hate it” (Day of the Black Sun, The Fortuneteller) to “no” (Ember Island Players). Yet Katara’s eventual capitulation to reciprocation of Aang’s feelings was always depicted as inevitable, starting from s1 when the prisoners during Avatar Day reassured him that she’d “come around” because he’s a catch. It’s as if friendship, even one full of devotion and mutual love like the one they share, is not enough.

And that’s just totally antithetical to what I love about a friends-to-lovers dynamic. I love romances where characters value each other outside of attraction, when they see each other for who they are (this goes double for pretty characters like Katara, whose complexity and imperfections are just as important as her beauty and her care for others). I love the idiots in love sub-trope, where they’re obviously into each other, yet do a bunch of mental gymnastics to remain in comfortable denial (we got a little bit of this earlier in the series, but by s3 we were firmly in Aang-pines-and-Katara-deflects territory). In every friends-to-lovers story I’m simply obsessed with the confess-and-kiss scene, but the version we got in ATLA was ruined by the lack of reciprocation, twice.

Over time, because Aang was written as so insistent about his affections, Ka/taang went from a friends-to-lovers story to a Nice Guy Friend Zone “why doesn’t she like me” story. I mentioned Everlark earlier: I got the same ick for Gale in Mockingjay as I did for Aang in s3, where the woman is not interested yet he still badgers her about it. (And considering Gale is canonically hot, I don’t think the relative attractiveness of Aang is the issue here). But Gale’s insistence was presented as his problem, his lack of empathy, his self-righteousness; Aang’s insistence was just a part of his quest to get the girl.

A lot of people say Zutara is a female fantasy, whether they mean it in a positive or pejorative way. Nobody says the same about Ka/taang, even though women definitely have friends-to-lovers fantasies too. A good friends-to-lovers story reminds me of all the times when I was an idiot before getting together with a friend I was actually head-over-heels for. Ka/taang reminds me of all the times when I was not interested in a friend and they didn’t respect my preference. Friends-to-lovers is a delicate balance, maintained only by unerring mutual respect and unconditional care for each other, and it can veer into Nice Guyism if the writers aren’t thoughtful about why this dynamic is so appealing. Which is exactly what happened with Ka/taang.

[laniidae-passerine]

in all honesty I hope they don’t announce s4 of Hannibal, not because of any truly valid concerns, but because all the promotional material was absolutely atrocious and I’d hate to see it return

[zarla-s]

I was cleaning up some broken links on my old silly Pokemon fansite, the Neglected Pokemon Lovers Unite (NPLU), and I realized that it has now been open for 25 years. TWENTY. FIVE. YEARS. That is an ASTONISHING amount of time for a site to stay open! Even if the last substantial update was like back in 2009 lol. The world around it has changed so much, but I think it's still valuable as a time capsule of a certain time on the internet. I wrote up a new essay about it on the site and did some general clean-up here and there.

Anyway to that end, since so much of the fic and art there is so old, I decided to compare Radic's oldest form to his newest! Radic was always a human boy but I just couldn't draw humans at the time so I made him a furry lol. Eventually I figured it out.

I also thought it'd be a neat challenge to mimic my own style back when it was really wonky and bad. And it was! It was kind of fun actually. I don't have too many shots of Radic from back then (it was hard to get art on the internet in the late 90's-early 00's), but I do have a few - hugging Kitsune, two old kiribans if you want to compare. I had a lot more old shots of Parasects though to reference unsurprisingly, they were very triangular lol. I think I did a pretty good job of matching what my art used to look like. I had a clear see-through Gameboy back in the day if you can't tell what Radic is holding lol.

("Isn't Radic the faceless avatar of your gamer self as depicted in Handplates-" yes, but Pokemon!Radic is the only one that actually became his own character, all the rest are shells)

If you do go poking around the NPLU, please keep in mind that almost everything there is very old and most of the fic and art is pretty bad (and shockingly violent). Plz do not judge me! My younger self was a cringey weeb but she was trying very hard. :<

[patreon]

[percabeth4life]

People who say Percy would sacrifice the world for his loved ones clearly didn't read book 1 of the series where he sacrificed his mom to save the world.

[anirritant]

umm i guess im treating this like an au now ahah

pmd2 darkrai hasn't had time to figure out wtf is going on (he's been here for like an hour tops). he's lost his composure immediately lol