twoohugs - Tumblr blog

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Got the big urge to draw some puppies! 🐶🐾

You can get them as enamel pins too!

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This really makes the Studios costing themselves even more money (and getting more unions involved) by prolonging the strike for the promise of free ai labor even more fucking funny. you dumb fucking bastards lol

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The other day I told a friend of mine that I never forget to take my ADHD meds because I fucking love my ADHD meds. I'm in my late 30s, I didn't finally get a diagnosis and meds until less than two years ago, and they have changed my entire life.

And he raised his eyebrow at me. We'd been discussing addictive medications a few minutes before, like the Tramadol I finally got from the pain specialist to take once a week or so to give me a break from my chronic pain, so I reassured him that methylpenidate (Ritalin/Concerta) is not addictive (at least not in people with ADHD).

His response? To raise his eyebrow even harder and say "Well it sure SOUNDS like it's addictive!"

And I had to explain to this man - who works in a healthcare related job by the way - that just because medication makes you feel good and helps you, just because you look forward to taking it, that doesn't make it addictive or dangerous. And he wasn't convinced.

The simple fact that I was excited to take a daily pill that has literally changed my life, after decades of fighting to get that medication, made him think I shouldn't be taking it so often. That it must inherently be dangerous.

I'm not even in America, but I'm pretty sure this attitude began there and then spread over here to Europe. This Puritan idea of "if something feels good, you must beware of it. Pleasure is dangerous, it is sinful, it is addiction, it is evil."

I know too many people who subconsciously believe that pleasure = addictive = dangerous = bad. Joy is a slippery slope to hell.

So here is your reminder for today that you don't need to be afraid of feeling good. If something improves your life, use it. Even if it is addictive - learn what that addiction means, whether the addiction is inherently dangerous or not, and whether the benefits outweigh the drawbacks and risks.

My ADHD meds are, in fact, not addictive. But I will take them every day because they make my life orders of magnitude easier. I will enjoy them every time I take them.

My tramadol is addictive. I will still take it. I will keep it on a schedule to avoid becoming addicted, primarily because addiction in this case would mean reduced effectiveness. But I am not afraid of my painkillers. They are life changing.

Take your meds, everyone. Don't let anyone scare you away from doing something that improves your life.

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oh! I have to tell you guys a great story one of my professors told me. So he has a friend who is involved in these Shakespeare outreach programs where they try to bring Shakespeare and live theatre to poor and underprivileged groups and teach them about English literature and performing arts and such. On one of their tours they stopped at a young offenders institute for women and they put on a performance of Romeo and Juliet for a group of 16-17 year old girls. It was all going really well and the girls were enjoying and laughing through the first half - because really, the first half is pretty much a comedy - but as the play went on, things started to get quiet. Real quiet. Then it got up to the suicide scene and mutterings broke out and all the girls were nudging each other and looking distressed, and as this teacher observed them, he realised - they didn’t know how the play ended. These girls had never been exposed to the story of Romeo and Juliet before, something which he thought was impossible given how ubiquitous it is in our culture. I mean, the prologue even gives the ending away, but of course it doesn’t specify exactly how the whole “take their life” thing goes down, so these poor girls had no idea what to expect and were sitting there clinging to hope that Romeo would maybe sit down for a damn minute instead of murdering Paris and chugging poison - but BAM he died and they all cried out - and then Juliet WOKE UP and they SCREAMED and by the end of the play they were so upset that a brawl nearly broke out, and that’s the story of how Shakespeare nearly started a riot at a juvenile detention centre

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So look. I agree there should be more queer folks involved in the creation of media, particularly mainstream media. (Other groups too but I’m speaking on queer folks right now.) Queer people are underrepresented and shoved to the side and poorly portrayed and that sucks, and there should be more of us involved, particularly when it comes to telling our stories.

HOWEVER

Nothing good comes of the idea that ONLY queer folks should tell queer stories or portray queer characters, or that it’s okay to critique and harass straight folks purely for telling queer stories.

Why?

1. Segregation is not going to work in our favor. We know how “well make your own, then” plays out when the other group has the resources and institutional power. Especially if there’s no one even making them pay lip service to “separate but equal.” It’s not going to be any better if the segregation is self-imposed.

2. Saying straight folks can’t make queer media gives them a convenient excuse to simply not include any queer characters at all in the majority of stories, and I thought we hated that? I thought that was explicitly a bad thing? We WANT straight creators to be doing their best to write us well so we’ll be represented in a full range of mainstream media. Saying they can’t do it right and shouldn’t try lets them off the hook.

3. It puts closeted queer creators in a bind. Either they stay closeted and be harassed by angry queer folks, they come out and expose themselves to harassment from bigots, or they simply never tell queer stories, their own stories. The world gets worse for some subset of queer folks and fewer authentic queer stories get told. Net loss.

4. It makes the small pool of out queer creators the arbiters of queer narratives, which sucks for people who don’t see themselves well represented. There is no single definitive queer narrative and the smaller the pool of Approved Creators the more we risk instating a false one.

5. It opens the door to further divisions within the community. If a straight person can’t possibly understand a trans person well enough to write about or act them, can a cis gay person? So should a cis gay man ONLY write characters who are cis gay men? Ridiculous. No, all queer people are not alike and do not have the same experiences. So either we need to overcome that to learn about and empathize with other people and stand in solidarity, or we’re all going to splinter off into our own little bubbles which, again, is explicitly bad for both our real-life community and our fiction.

We want people to write about others who aren’t like them. We want people to write about others who aren’t like them. We also want people like us to have the opportunity to tell our stories but making it an exclusive privilege can only backfire.

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Ya know when people told me "when you're finally safe enough that you can leave survival mode and start to let go of and process your c-ptsd/trauma things are probably going to get really, really bad before they slowly start to get better" I thought that was reasonable. I did not understand that by "things are going to get bad" they meant "you're going to find yourself in the worst mental state of your entire life, but dw, that means it's working" and tbh I simply wish someone had been more clear.

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This is such a skill

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Sometimes we’re so busy looking at our next big goal that we forget to rest after all the hard work getting to where we are! It can be nice to pause and appreciate how much we have already put in. 💛

Chibird store | Positive pin club | Instagram

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Season 1 Trivia | PERCY JACKSON AND THE OLYMPIANS

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*casually draping my arm around your shoulder and gesturing with my other hand*

Now hear me out, pal, what if– what if I think ALL culture, art and writing are important and worth preserving, regardless of who wrote it and whether or not they’re deemed marketable by the capitalist institution?

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so my apartment building got a notice board to post fire alarm tests and maintenance announcements and such. the building is pretty well-maintained, so we rarely get notices. the board is big and grey and to think it would be empty like that 99% of the time was a bland boring sin i just couldn't bear, so i vandalized the corner of its empty canvas with a teeny tiny Guy

and within a few days, there was a sudden addition from my one of my neighbors along with a Bunch of thumbtacks. this was an unexpected, but welcome surprise!

well there was still so much space, i figured i'd add another crumb to the art hoard. i'd been playing genshin that day so i drew my favorite grandpa

and like clockwork, new art manifested!! this person is gonna grow to be a great artist i know it. the detail in those stones? hell yeah that's cool.

we're two weeks into it. more neighbors have joined in with their artwork. who knew there were so many artists in my building?? we're onto somethin great here i just know it.

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At the gate for my flight home from visiting friends and there's a woman here with a service Shiba Inu. No pics because he has a Do Not Disturb vest and taking pics of strangers is illegal but I need to stress how ON DUTY this animal is. Ears up. Eyes doing Lazer scans of everything. Examining everyone who passes within 10ft like a security guard. Ass planted on her feet. I have never seen a dog with such intense chivalric guardian energy before. He has tiny eyebrows and they are FURROWED with concentration.

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beauty standards are so fucked up what happened to i love your body because it's you. what then.

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So apparently the pro-Tetris scene is exploding right now because a 13 year old nerd just reached the game's true killscreen for the first time ever

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tiktokers who say classic lit is bad because its not relatable 1. thats not the fucking point 2. you've clearly never read twelfth night as a trans bisexual

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Me: *scrolling tumblr*

Castiel: I love you

Me: Dear god what’s happened now