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me getting into a seemily comedic podcast: oh boy I sure hope this doesn’t hurt me emotionally

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tw flashing or pulsing (think synthwave visuals unforch)

apparently i'm on a mission to recommend powderpaint today hashtag notsponsored. obviously their original stuff but their f+tm cover is everything a cover should be

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Do you have any recommendations for lesbian/queer music artists or groups? I would like to broaden my listening interests 🧐

Ahh yes thank you for the opportunity to do my favorite thing lol! I was on lunch break and could have done a million other things but opened the app and saw this ask and was like....this is way more fun lol. I didn't include chappell, muna, boygenius members, clario, kehlani and others like that because I feel like they are already pretty well known in the community but if you haven't gotten into any of them...do it.

here's my list of artist recs! I feel like I am missing people but this was off the top of my head! All of the artist below have differing sexualities but make music specifically about being women into women, if you want a more broad range of queer recs ever too I have even more lol. Hope something here is for you and your taste!

rett madison (one of the best voices I've ever heard could not rec more. a lot of her music centers on concepts of grief/family trauma but her songs emily, god is a woman, and pin up daddy are specifically focused on her gender/sexual identity)

pom pom squad (pretty girl rock!!!)

syd (broken hearts club is such an underrated album. yearny r&b done just right. also watch the fast car video cause yeah 🥵)

maude latour (new pop princess of the year to me! cosmic superstar yearning!)

victoria monet (I feel like she is almost in the "well known" category after her grammy win but I have been riding with her for so long that still feels fake. touch me remix is the sexiest song of all time)

the last dinner party (the band is diverse in terms of both sexuality and gender identity but the music as a whole is inherently bisexual to me a bisexual)

romy (lesbian dance music that makes you feel like life is worth living)

shura (I miss her... come back! beautiful songs about lesbian love and yearning)

the aces (my sweethearts the make such fun pop rock)

rina sawayama (another maybe too big? oh well. genre defying icon. stream cherry)

carol ades (maybe my favorite new artist I decided to listen to this year? pop music for the girlies who overthink and feel constantly behind)

marika hackman (lesbian indie rock legend to me)

arlo parks (softest loveliest voice and such a good songwriter)

the japanese house (dreamy lesbian pop icon)

brooke eden (LESBIAN COUNTRY! I REPEAT LESBIAN COUNTRY)

daya (specifically montana...gay cowgirl classic)

emily burns (super hooky and catchy songerwriter...I used to be really into her and overplayed girlfriend at the time lol need to check out her new stuff)

gia woods (really weird fun lesbian pop...super underrated)

pale waves (lesbian goth festival rock!!! so excited for the new record this month)

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Had a dream where Johnny from “The Devil Went Down To Georgia” came out as a trans woman and the response was so unanimously positive it reversed nearly all of the transphobic bills in the South. She played live in Georgia to an audience of about a third of the US.

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Redoing this poll, for my fellow audio drama/fiction podcast (the magnus archives, malevolent, penumbra, etc.) listeners, where do you listen to your podcasts?

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Keeping it short because I have been dreading it but if anyone noticed the "public humiliation" thing,

I have been trying to figure out how to write this for a long time because it's embarrassing to write about it but trying to get back into this blog while pretending nothing happened would be even more embarrassing in the way known to anyone who has had to go into school or work putting on a brave face while everyone knows what happened to you,

if anyone saw what happened where I posted about my life going wrong and no matter how carefully I edited it most of my friends and acquaintances on here stopped talking to me,

for what it's worth you do not know which people did NOT stop talking to me so don't play social guessing games but there is no way it's not clear that most people did,

it felt like it would feel to any other person on Earth to deal with sexual violence &c &c and people stopping talking to you at the same time and I refuse to demean myself with some kind of "It felt like…" metaphor because all it felt like was how it was,

in the months since I've thought a lot about why people did that,

I think the most likely cause is that seeing something terrible happen to me after I had posted that I thought my life might be looking up meant that they thought I weren't trying hard enough and that made me a write-off or lost cause,

but it could be anything,

For what it's worth, assault and violence happen because the perpetrator chooses, not because their targets didn't try hard enough to stop them,

there are people in the world who don't do the "She didn't fight hard enough so she must be a lost cause" thing,

I've been listening to a lot of CT40 country and old radio shows this year and I know I still have many podcast and music opinions of lukewarm interest and varying taste to offer the world so I will consider myself writing for whoever in the latter category is out there. The End

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Personal Post Reblog Psaturday Monday 2! Update is really there is no update (I have been busting ass and having some wonderful luck, so I would say things are better than Personal Post Reblog Psaturday 1, but I don't want to jump the gun on optimism and am trying to hang on to "100% realize it is 100% possible for you to die" so I keep taking things seriously enough). Still looking for help, still hoping I'll be able to come on here with an actual good update soon and do the fandom equivalent of throwing money around (won't have much actual money but, more fanfic comments? art comments? memes)

Life update (not good)

And asking for help though I don't think anyone I know on Tumblr will be able to help with this, but I am trying to cast a wide net.

After my "there's a good chance things might actually be okay-adjacent soon but I'm scared it won't and hope it will" post I was really hoping I would have a "Things worked out!" update, but unfortunately this. Right now my life is not close to worst it's been (this year and last are still the best years in a long while!) but things have been fucked up.

I don't know how to say "i don't scare easy" without it sounding like country-western braggadocio but but the last few years have included living with creeps, living out of my car, various varyingly obnoxious brushes with death, and this is a more five-alarm fire level than average, even though still hopeful and still better than things are for many people for sure.

My internal project this past month and a half has been working on getting myself to 100% believe that it is 100% possible for me to die, which is not something I /didn't/ before - I wrote a will in 2019, and I had a long conversation with a friend in 2022 about the possibility of dying, obviously it's been on my mind - but i think it's just really hard for human beings (or at least me) to /really/ feel like it's possible to die in whatever dangerous situations we're in because we're just kind of neurologically wired for a certain amount of optimism in the face of death. At least the last few years it's not like there is one specific monster with big teeth chasing me, so it's easy to be like, well, statistically I /probably/ won't die from that or this or the other - like, if [medical stuff, living on the road, violence, hospital-acquired covid if I end up in hospital now that most hospitals aren't taking covid precautions here, &c] together means I have a 3x or 4x or 20x higher risk of dying than the average person in their late 20s, then people in our late twenties still don't die very often so mathematically that's still just multiplying three or four or twenty times /a really low number/ in the first place.

Statistically I will probably live...and neurologically I'm wired to say "I'm gonna make it :)"…but that means that this month and a half (have to do a double take because it's only been a month and a half! somehow!) I've had to make it a little internal project to continuously remind myself that it is 100% possible for me to die and I need to take everything that seriously, accordingly.

So many people, victim services nonprofits, &c over the years have come down so much more on the side of "Look into my eyes. You WILL get through this." than be worried about me, so I'm the one who has to take this on and remind myself it is 100% possible for me to die, so that I can take everything exactly as seriously as it needs to be taken, and also try to kick my own ass into hiding in shitty coping mechanisms less.

I have things SO much better than many people (!!) (which i know is a Thing Everyone Says out of free-floating guilt when they're struggling, but also, it's definitely true in this instance, and i don't want y'all to worry about me disproportionately). Things are bad but I also do know what I'm doing somewhat, after handling crises for so many years, and I also have alotalot of luck, which I am incredibly and unspeakably grateful for.

(Speaking of the positive, a lot of the current situation was kicked off by an especially scary medical scare last month that wrecked a lot of shit, and very luckily, most of the scariest medical stuff has been ruled out! That's one reason to be optimistic! Though I need to then bring it back to "Do /not/ let this let you take your eye off the ball, dude, everything else is still fucked up and it is still possible for you to die so Take This Seriously.")

The thing is, most of the pieces that made me hopeful at the beginning of last month when I was posting here are /still here/ ready to be put together. I had to drop out of my class this semester but I'm still in good standing in the certificate program I started and if I can fix the rest of my life enough I can start another class this summer. I /have/ a not super lucrative but decent and interesting paid side hustle, I have volunteering and helping others I can do, I have writing I can do, as long as I can get things a decent amount of unfucked. I am still jonesing to get on here and give y'all the Good Update.

I've avoided nonprofits and hotlines for the last year and a half, since my last go-round ended up doing more harm than good, but I sucked it up and told myself maybe it would be better this time and it was not, so this week I need to call another, unrelated victim services nonprofit to tell them the nonprofit I contacted last month did [deeply awful stuff] so that I can have a paper trail for /that/ so /that/ doesn't make the original problem worse, which is kind of the opposite of what one is looking for when one calls a nonprofit "for help."

(I don't want to dissuade people from seeking help from support services - I'm having mental images of someone reading this and not getting the help they need because I talked shit about nonprofits - but I guess I /would/ say, I /do/ want people to go in knowing that there are people who will help, and there are people who can't help (which depending on the context might be fair and there is nothing they can do), and there are also people who will demean you or not believe you or promise things they don't deliver. And I could write a post on how to try to stay safe when interfacing with nonprofits that supposedly represent "help" and "safety" and often do not, but sometimes absolutely do, but I am evidently still learning myself, so I will just say come in with backup plans, and if they hurt you it was not your fault.)

I spent my childhood in what I call "the casserole world" - culturally it was normal for friends or family to bring each other a casserole or help with errands when something hard happened and my specific context was functional enough that people would do that kind of thing. So!! Asking for help on here, if anyone has a spouse or friend or uncle who likes helping with logistical things like reading hundreds of dentist office reviews to find dentists who both accept Medicaid and are not evil incarnate or online discount clothing shopping - I don't really expect to find that kind of help here (back at it with the statistics), so in a way it's more that I don't want to cut myself off from the possibility. If 9 out of 10 times "just ask for help :)" isn't actually a thing, that means that you still need to, at least sometimes, cautiously ask the metaphorical tenth time when you find a place where that's not going to hurt someone else and it seems plausible. Like I said, I'm trying to cast a wide net!

(Editing for typoes and to add a Medicaid explanation for those not in the U.S.: Medicaid is free insurance e.g. free healthcare for people who make very little money, and it is free to the patient, but many doctors don't accept Medicaid, and the ones that do tend to be, uh. Bad. Or booked out for months, if they are not bad.)

[tunedtostatic]

Life update (not good)

And asking for help though I don't think anyone I know on Tumblr will be able to help with this, but I am trying to cast a wide net.

After my "there's a good chance things might actually be okay-adjacent soon but I'm scared it won't and hope it will" post I was really hoping I would have a "Things worked out!" update, but unfortunately this. Right now my life is not close to worst it's been (this year and last are still the best years in a long while!) but things have been fucked up.

I don't know how to say "i don't scare easy" without it sounding like country-western braggadocio but but the last few years have included living with creeps, living out of my car, various varyingly obnoxious brushes with death, and this is a more five-alarm fire level than average, even though still hopeful and still better than things are for many people for sure.

My internal project this past month and a half has been working on getting myself to 100% believe that it is 100% possible for me to die, which is not something I /didn't/ before - I wrote a will in 2019, and I had a long conversation with a friend in 2022 about the possibility of dying, obviously it's been on my mind - but i think it's just really hard for human beings (or at least me) to /really/ feel like it's possible to die in whatever dangerous situations we're in because we're just kind of neurologically wired for a certain amount of optimism in the face of death. At least the last few years it's not like there is one specific monster with big teeth chasing me, so it's easy to be like, well, statistically I /probably/ won't die from that or this or the other - like, if [medical stuff, living on the road, violence, hospital-acquired covid if I end up in hospital now that most hospitals aren't taking covid precautions here, &c] together means I have a 3x or 4x or 20x higher risk of dying than the average person in their late 20s, then people in our late twenties still don't die very often so mathematically that's still just multiplying three or four or twenty times /a really low number/ in the first place.

Statistically I will probably live...and neurologically I'm wired to say "I'm gonna make it :)"…but that means that this month and a half (have to do a double take because it's only been a month and a half! somehow!) I've had to make it a little internal project to continuously remind myself that it is 100% possible for me to die and I need to take everything that seriously, accordingly.

So many people, victim services nonprofits, &c over the years have come down so much more on the side of "Look into my eyes. You WILL get through this." than be worried about me, so I'm the one who has to take this on and remind myself it is 100% possible for me to die, so that I can take everything exactly as seriously as it needs to be taken, and also try to kick my own ass into hiding in shitty coping mechanisms less.

I have things SO much better than many people (!!) (which i know is a Thing Everyone Says out of free-floating guilt when they're struggling, but also, it's definitely true in this instance, and i don't want y'all to worry about me disproportionately). Things are bad but I also do know what I'm doing somewhat, after handling crises for so many years, and I also have alotalot of luck, which I am incredibly and unspeakably grateful for.

(Speaking of the positive, a lot of the current situation was kicked off by an especially scary medical scare last month that wrecked a lot of shit, and very luckily, most of the scariest medical stuff has been ruled out! That's one reason to be optimistic! Though I need to then bring it back to "Do /not/ let this let you take your eye off the ball, dude, everything else is still fucked up and it is still possible for you to die so Take This Seriously.")

The thing is, most of the pieces that made me hopeful at the beginning of last month when I was posting here are /still here/ ready to be put together. I had to drop out of my class this semester but I'm still in good standing in the certificate program I started and if I can fix the rest of my life enough I can start another class this summer. I /have/ a not super lucrative but decent and interesting paid side hustle, I have volunteering and helping others I can do, I have writing I can do, as long as I can get things a decent amount of unfucked. I am still jonesing to get on here and give y'all the Good Update.

I've avoided nonprofits and hotlines for the last year and a half, since my last go-round ended up doing more harm than good, but I sucked it up and told myself maybe it would be better this time and it was not, so this week I need to call another, unrelated victim services nonprofit to tell them the nonprofit I contacted last month did [deeply awful stuff] so that I can have a paper trail for /that/ so /that/ doesn't make the original problem worse, which is kind of the opposite of what one is looking for when one calls a nonprofit "for help."

(I don't want to dissuade people from seeking help from support services - I'm having mental images of someone reading this and not getting the help they need because I talked shit about nonprofits - but I guess I /would/ say, I /do/ want people to go in knowing that there are people who will help, and there are people who can't help (which depending on the context might be fair and there is nothing they can do), and there are also people who will demean you or not believe you or promise things they don't deliver. And I could write a post on how to try to stay safe when interfacing with nonprofits that supposedly represent "help" and "safety" and often do not, but sometimes absolutely do, but I am evidently still learning myself, so I will just say come in with backup plans, and if they hurt you it was not your fault.)

I spent my childhood in what I call "the casserole world" - culturally it was normal for friends or family to bring each other a casserole or help with errands when something hard happened and my specific context was functional enough that people would do that kind of thing. So!! Asking for help on here, if anyone has a spouse or friend or uncle who likes helping with logistical things like reading hundreds of dentist office reviews to find dentists who both accept Medicaid and are not evil incarnate or online discount clothing shopping - I don't really expect to find that kind of help here (back at it with the statistics), so in a way it's more that I don't want to cut myself off from the possibility. If 9 out of 10 times "just ask for help :)" isn't actually a thing, that means that you still need to, at least sometimes, cautiously ask the metaphorical tenth time when you find a place where that's not going to hurt someone else and it seems plausible. Like I said, I'm trying to cast a wide net!

(Editing for typoes and to add a Medicaid explanation for those not in the U.S.: Medicaid is free insurance e.g. free healthcare for people who make very little money, and it is free to the patient, but many doctors don't accept Medicaid, and the ones that do tend to be, uh. Bad. Or booked out for months, if they are not bad.)

[tunedtostatic]

Life update (not good)

And asking for help though I don't think anyone I know on Tumblr will be able to help with this, but I am trying to cast a wide net.

After my "there's a good chance things might actually be okay-adjacent soon but I'm scared it won't and hope it will" post I was really hoping I would have a "Things worked out!" update, but unfortunately this. Right now my life is not close to worst it's been (this year and last are still the best years in a long while!) but things have been fucked up.

I don't know how to say "i don't scare easy" without it sounding like country-western braggadocio but but the last few years have included living with creeps, living out of my car, various varyingly obnoxious brushes with death, and this is a more five-alarm fire level than average, even though still hopeful and still better than things are for many people for sure.

My internal project this past month and a half has been working on getting myself to 100% believe that it is 100% possible for me to die, which is not something I /didn't/ before - I wrote a will in 2019, and I had a long conversation with a friend in 2022 about the possibility of dying, obviously it's been on my mind - but i think it's just really hard for human beings (or at least me) to /really/ feel like it's possible to die in whatever dangerous situations we're in because we're just kind of neurologically wired for a certain amount of optimism in the face of death. At least the last few years it's not like there is one specific monster with big teeth chasing me, so it's easy to be like, well, statistically I /probably/ won't die from that or this or the other - like, if [medical stuff, living on the road, violence, hospital-acquired covid if I end up in hospital now that most hospitals aren't taking covid precautions here, &c] together means I have a 3x or 4x or 20x higher risk of dying than the average person in their late 20s, then people in our late twenties still don't die very often so mathematically that's still just multiplying three or four or twenty times /a really low number/ in the first place.

Statistically I will probably live...and neurologically I'm wired to say "I'm gonna make it :)"…but that means that this month and a half (have to do a double take because it's only been a month and a half! somehow!) I've had to make it a little internal project to continuously remind myself that it is 100% possible for me to die and I need to take everything that seriously, accordingly.

So many people, victim services nonprofits, &c over the years have come down so much more on the side of "Look into my eyes. You WILL get through this." than be worried about me, so I'm the one who has to take this on and remind myself it is 100% possible for me to die, so that I can take everything exactly as seriously as it needs to be taken, and also try to kick my own ass into hiding in shitty coping mechanisms less.

I have things SO much better than many people (!!) (which i know is a Thing Everyone Says out of free-floating guilt when they're struggling, but also, it's definitely true in this instance, and i don't want y'all to worry about me disproportionately). Things are bad but I also do know what I'm doing somewhat, after handling crises for so many years, and I also have alotalot of luck, which I am incredibly and unspeakably grateful for.

(Speaking of the positive, a lot of the current situation was kicked off by an especially scary medical scare last month that wrecked a lot of shit, and very luckily, most of the scariest medical stuff has been ruled out! That's one reason to be optimistic! Though I need to then bring it back to "Do /not/ let this let you take your eye off the ball, dude, everything else is still fucked up and it is still possible for you to die so Take This Seriously.")

The thing is, most of the pieces that made me hopeful at the beginning of last month when I was posting here are /still here/ ready to be put together. I had to drop out of my class this semester but I'm still in good standing in the certificate program I started and if I can fix the rest of my life enough I can start another class this summer. I /have/ a not super lucrative but decent and interesting paid side hustle, I have volunteering and helping others I can do, I have writing I can do, as long as I can get things a decent amount of unfucked. I am still jonesing to get on here and give y'all the Good Update.

I've avoided nonprofits and hotlines for the last year and a half, since my last go-round ended up doing more harm than good, but I sucked it up and told myself maybe it would be better this time and it was not, so this week I need to call another, unrelated victim services nonprofit to tell them the nonprofit I contacted last month did [deeply awful stuff] so that I can have a paper trail for /that/ so /that/ doesn't make the original problem worse, which is kind of the opposite of what one is looking for when one calls a nonprofit "for help."

(I don't want to dissuade people from seeking help from support services - I'm having mental images of someone reading this and not getting the help they need because I talked shit about nonprofits - but I guess I /would/ say, I /do/ want people to go in knowing that there are people who will help, and there are people who can't help (which depending on the context might be fair and there is nothing they can do), and there are also people who will demean you or not believe you or promise things they don't deliver. And I could write a post on how to try to stay safe when interfacing with nonprofits that supposedly represent "help" and "safety" and often do not, but sometimes absolutely do, but I am evidently still learning myself, so I will just say come in with backup plans, and if they hurt you it was not your fault.)

I spent my childhood in what I call "the casserole world" - culturally it was normal for friends or family to bring each other a casserole or help with errands when something hard happened and my specific context was functional enough that people would do that kind of thing. So!! Asking for help on here, if anyone has a spouse or friend or uncle who likes helping with logistical things like reading hundreds of dentist office reviews to find dentists who both accept Medicaid and are not evil incarnate or online discount clothing shopping - I don't really expect to find that kind of help here (back at it with the statistics), so in a way it's more that I don't want to cut myself off from the possibility. If 9 out of 10 times "just ask for help :)" isn't actually a thing, that means that you still need to, at least sometimes, cautiously ask the metaphorical tenth time when you find a place where that's not going to hurt someone else and it seems plausible. Like I said, I'm trying to cast a wide net!

(Editing for typoes and to add a Medicaid explanation for those not in the U.S.: Medicaid is free insurance e.g. free healthcare for people who make very little money, and it is free to the patient, but many doctors don't accept Medicaid, and the ones that do tend to be, uh. Bad. Or booked out for months, if they are not bad.)

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tagged by @ante--meridiem

Currently reading: I'm on the verge of quitting The Unspoken Name by A.K. Larkwood, not because it's objectively bad but because I'm not enjoying it for reasons I might noodle on about on my book blog. I have a stack of library books so I'm not sure what I'll try next.

Currently watching: @sinceyouaskedme recommended Mic the Snare and I've been watching some of his discography deep dives, which led to a very funny situation where I watched the one about Radiohead and then listened to Ok Computer by Radiohead for the first time (regarded by many as one of the greatest albums of all time), and it was very good, and I was like, I can't go online and be like "Oh my god you guys I'm sure know one else knows this but did you know Ok Computer by Radiohead is good?!"

Currently obsessed with: I looked up what turned out to be The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats on Friday because I was trying to figure out where one of its lines came from, and first of all holy shit I did not realize how much it is to 20th-21th century literature and pop culture as Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen is to ao3. All those are from the same poem? Second of all, it's very good (much like Ok Computer by Radiohead is very good, one could say 🙂). I ended up looking up a list of ultra-famous poems, because I realized that not having taken any lit classes beyond high school means there are many ultra-famous poems that I haven't ever come across. I'm resisting the urge to say something defensive, because not knowing certain poems when you could have Taken The Initiative And Looked Them Up Whenever is something people get so wildly mean about, like hiking, but I didn't and who cares. And now I have! (Did you guys know The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot is also very good?!)

Last song listened to: Silence by Lizz Wright, best known round this blog for being the artist I discovered by getting her 2008 album The Orchard buying thrift store CDs last summer, which I then listened to for months because. I mean. When I went to get that link I paused writing this for two minutes to relisten to the first half of the first track because 😭😭❗❗, 10/10 Ok Computers by Radiohead, source: dude trust me. Also previously seen round this blog for Goodbye on (ironically) the Astrid-Caleb reunion, race you to the top section of my Astrid fanmix ("so you take the high road/and I'll take the low" indeed).

Silence is also from her first 2003 album, and I cagily didn't link it first because I feel like it's a little less overtly knock your socks off, but it too is !! (I feel like it really kicks off at the end of the second verse with the vocals and instrumentals on "that silence is a song.")

tagging with no pressure to do it, @sinceyouaskedme @perpetualnovelboyfriend @smirk47 @cindereleanor

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This year's prompts!

Hello, everyone! I have reached spring break and finally had time to work on this.

While I had been hoping to create a tongue in cheek list of prompts based on various blorbo posts, when you start sifting through them they tend to boil down to the same general sentiments, which is not helpful for prompt creation. So, I went in a different direction.

Monday: What about sad wet cat women? Highlight a podcast starring women in the leading role(s).

Tuesday: This too is yuri... Spotlight a F/F ship (or platonic or familial relationship between women if that's your preference).

Wednesday: WIP Wednesday! We all have art/fic/meta we've been meaning to get to. This is your day to finally commit (as long as your WIP is about podcast women, of course.)

Thursday: Nobody understands her like I do... Recognize a woman from a podcast you think is niche and/or underappreciated.

Friday: God forbid women do anything. Celebrate a female villain. Defend your #problematic fave.

Saturday: Self-indulgence Saturday! Make something you've really wanted to make but haven't because you thought it was too self-indulgent, niche, or silly.

Sunday: Free space!

Remember -- Podcast Girls Week will take place on July 8 - 14. I can't wait!

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it’s 3am and i currently wholeheartedly believe that eiffel intended to say “i love you”. not as a declaration, but as a star wars reference. he wanted to go out on an “i love you” / “i know”. he wanted to go out on a joke, and he trusted hera— who’s probably heard him recap this scene dozens of times— to finish it. he wanted to go out on a bit, and he wanted her in on it, and honestly i think that’s the purest form of love there is.

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📚📖

I did make the booklr! wroughtironcliches

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Also, if anyone has any benign timewasters to recommend, that would also be very helpful. My go-to when I want to turn my brain off for a few minutes has been book review sites for genres I'm only kind of into (because then my brain is focused on whatever it's reading, but not enough to get annoyed when a reviewer has a Bad Take), and while I'm proud of myself for finding something banal and sticking with it instead of making my default "turn my brain off" activity doomscrolling social media (which does not actually turn my brain off any more than it does anyone else's), my mainstay sites have been annoying me lately and I think it might be the better part of valor to give it up and start learning puzzles, or ??

I'm thinking about starting a booklr, which I wish I mentioned in my original post because now I feel like saying so looks like I'm sulking about not getting any book recommendations here so far, but it's something I've been thinking about on and off since last year - I feel like it will Be Good For Me to have a place to talk a lot to hear my head rattle. I'm realizing that not really having a place for that (between not taking up too much airtime in conversations with friends and by dint of having just moved being at the "Oh, you enjoy movies? Perhaps we should do something such as view a movie together at some time!" level of friendship with anyone local for the next while) is Making Me Weird and journaling only goes so far. (I also want to get around to starting to actually use Dreamwidth, especially in the context of tumblr's last 2-3 trashfires, so I guess I'll see what I get to first.)

Blog updates 2024 edition, or more specifically, one big, potentially very good update: Last year when I did my 2023 blog updates, almost but not quite a year ago now, I said I might be within a month or so of things no longer being in serious crisis/my life being basically okay-adjacent. It is hard to write this even now but it turned out that that didn't work out - things did get better, especially for a chunk of six months in the middle of the year when I had safe housing and things felt wonderful compared to the last few years, but neither external circumstances nor my own ability to deal with {PTSD, external circumstances, &c} got to the point hoped for where I would be able to say "I'm living a life where things are more or less normal and okay." Even though I never quite reached things being okay-adjacent during that chunk of months and things got not great again end of summer to now, having that time of things being close to almost okay-adjacent was a very important springboard to me for make it to a point now where I might be within reach of actually okay-adjacent.

Right now, what I said last year about potentially being within a month or so of things being basically okay is potentially true again, and I think I have a better shot at it this time for both external reasons and personal "knowing more about what to do to get safe and having my shit together" reasons. I might be within reach of things being okay-adjacent and feeling like I have a real normal life outside of crises (here defined as safe housing, employment, no people hurting me in my immediate vicinity, financial and scheduling ability to manage physical medical issues on a day to day basis while still eating without mental health issues getting in the way of that, clothing in drawers not trash bags, nothing actively medically scary).

If so this will be for the first time since 2018 so of course it's a big deal to me. Right now of course I'm both excited and relieved things might work out soon and terrified that they won't.

Meanwhile (the reason beyond updating that I'm posting this!), as I get ready to fully move into the place that will hopefully be the "safe housing" part of this, it's been really hitting me that even though living a life that is normal-adjacent and okay-adjacent will inherently be orders of magnitude better than the last 5+ years and of course I'm prepared to be extremely grateful for that, I'm still going to have all the grief and emptiness I have now. Even though I will as always be (too) busy in some ways trying to get everything done in a day while dealing with chronic pain, no longer having so much time soaked up trying to survive whatever the problem of the week or PTSD meltdown of the day is means that I'm going to have hours and hours of empty time to fill every week.

When I talk about loss I know some people's minds will jump to the worst case personal scenarios so I will clarify that I am fortunate that by grief I don't mean the death of an immediate family member, not that kind of grief. A lot of different things - people who have been awful, deaths, horribleness in my neighborhood that was like family, lost time, and all the losses prior to the last few years in some ways since grief doesn't fully go away, and then things like a close friendship breakup last year that is not as painful as any of the above since we are both alive and managed to be kind to each other throughout the breakup but it's still over. It has been hitting me that a lot of the work of grieving everything from the past couple decades, like the work of dealing with PTSD, is what I had to get through these past couple years to have a chance of getting my shit together, but now that I've made enough headway on the work of grieving to be able to have a chance at my life being okay, the losses and emptiness themselves will still be there ("still be gone"?)

If anyone has suggestions for fun stuff to do, book and movie recommendations, &c, it would be a really good time for them! If anyone can recommend social stuff, e.g. friendly good-boundary-having discord servers, that would be amazing. I think y'all know my favorite things in fiction and music (fiddles, writing fanfic that comes to a screeching halt 2-3 times a chapter to talk about food, thoughtful meditations on torture?, swords) but I'm usually down to at least give media outside my wheelhouse a try.

[tunedtostatic]

Blog updates 2024 edition, or more specifically, one big, potentially very good update: Last year when I did my 2023 blog updates, almost but not quite a year ago now, I said I might be within a month or so of things no longer being in serious crisis/my life being basically okay-adjacent. It is hard to write this even now but it turned out that that didn't work out - things did get better, especially for a chunk of six months in the middle of the year when I had safe housing and things felt wonderful compared to the last few years, but neither external circumstances nor my own ability to deal with {PTSD, external circumstances, &c} got to the point hoped for where I would be able to say "I'm living a life where things are more or less normal and okay." Even though I never quite reached things being okay-adjacent during that chunk of months and things got not great again end of summer to now, having that time of things being close to almost okay-adjacent was a very important springboard to me for make it to a point now where I might be within reach of actually okay-adjacent.

Right now, what I said last year about potentially being within a month or so of things being basically okay is potentially true again, and I think I have a better shot at it this time for both external reasons and personal "knowing more about what to do to get safe and having my shit together" reasons. I might be within reach of things being okay-adjacent and feeling like I have a real normal life outside of crises (here defined as safe housing, employment, no people hurting me in my immediate vicinity, financial and scheduling ability to manage physical medical issues on a day to day basis while still eating without mental health issues getting in the way of that, clothing in drawers not trash bags, nothing actively medically scary).

If so this will be for the first time since 2018 so of course it's a big deal to me. Right now of course I'm both excited and relieved things might work out soon and terrified that they won't.

Meanwhile (the reason beyond updating that I'm posting this!), as I get ready to fully move into the place that will hopefully be the "safe housing" part of this, it's been really hitting me that even though living a life that is normal-adjacent and okay-adjacent will inherently be orders of magnitude better than the last 5+ years and of course I'm prepared to be extremely grateful for that, I'm still going to have all the grief and emptiness I have now. Even though I will as always be (too) busy in some ways trying to get everything done in a day while dealing with chronic pain, no longer having so much time soaked up trying to survive whatever the problem of the week or PTSD meltdown of the day is means that I'm going to have hours and hours of empty time to fill every week.

When I talk about loss I know some people's minds will jump to the worst case personal scenarios so I will clarify that I am fortunate that by grief I don't mean the death of an immediate family member, not that kind of grief. A lot of different things - people who have been awful, deaths, horribleness in my neighborhood that was like family, lost time, and all the losses prior to the last few years in some ways since grief doesn't fully go away, and then things like a close friendship breakup last year that is not as painful as any of the above since we are both alive and managed to be kind to each other throughout the breakup but it's still over. It has been hitting me that a lot of the work of grieving everything from the past couple decades, like the work of dealing with PTSD, is what I had to get through these past couple years to have a chance of getting my shit together, but now that I've made enough headway on the work of grieving to be able to have a chance at my life being okay, the losses and emptiness themselves will still be there ("still be gone"?)

If anyone has suggestions for fun stuff to do, book and movie recommendations, &c, it would be a really good time for them! If anyone can recommend social stuff, e.g. friendly good-boundary-having discord servers, that would be amazing. I think y'all know my favorite things in fiction and music (fiddles, writing fanfic that comes to a screeching halt 2-3 times a chapter to talk about food, thoughtful meditations on torture?, swords) but I'm usually down to at least give media outside my wheelhouse a try.

[tunedtostatic]

Started having this discussion on discord and I am bringing it to tumblr. Most space stations do not have showers for obvious reasons, but Wolf 359 references the Hephaestus's showers several times. How do they work? For the purpose of this poll, I am not accepting the answers 'the writers didn't think about it' or 'that part of the station has gravity somehow'. Play in this 0 gravity space with me.

[tunedtostatic]

Listening to the new episodes of my podcasts like: