gonna grow you a place safer than this

alright everyone

I actually love the concept that being your authentic self will scare away the people who aren't meant to be near you.

i feel like sister cities was the wonder years ‘sleeper album’ for a lot of people which sucks because the effort and feelings and depth are 100% there like, in an album they managed to capture the exact feelings of traveling abroad, the problems waiting for you at home when you get back, and how a strange place still has hints of the familiar?

it’s such a gorgeous arrangement of songs and i wish they’d play them more at shows because 🥹

Something especially stuck out to me at the start of I Saw the TV Glow. Owen not being able to access The Pink Opaque right away. Only being able to interact with it through the commercials or borrowed episode guides. Not having the means or the freedom to connect with it. Desperate to access it, but being at the mercy of uncaring guardians.

And then finding that bridge. And you found that comfort in this whole new world. That sensation of losing yourself in this safety blanket. Pulling the media around your mind like a shield. You don't have the words to express why or how you're feeling these things. And you don't need the words. Because there's also community in the media. You aren't alone in this escape.

It’s annoying but the way you improve yourself is one tiny thing at a time

You can’t realistically stop all of your bad habits at once. So like. Pick one. Pick one thing in your life to work on. Eating slightly more vegetables or being slightly nicer to your coworkers or reducing the amount you drink. Something. And once that’s easy try something else.

the bravest thing I've ever done in my life was making it out of being 14 alive

I can’t stop thinking about that scene when Owen watches The Pink Opaque on her new tv, especially the part about it being “available for streaming”. Maybe I’m reading too much into it because it’s such a tiny detail, but it makes me want to scream.

Part of what made watching the show so special to her when she was younger was watching and rewatching those vhs tapes, eagerly waiting for the next one from Maddy. She cherished those tapes. And something about it being available for streaming feels like a gut-punch.

For something that meant so much to her, something that was such an important part of her life, to be able to be enjoyed in such an easy, careless, and insignificant way, to be stripped of such a large part of what made it so special to her, is devastating.

when e.e. cummings said “i’ll live my life if it kills me”

when andrea gibson said “i suppose i love this life, in spite of my clenched fist.” & when ellen bass said “to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it”

by raymond carver

Yet another comic about leaving the Mormon church that can be applied to a variety of things.

Every one should go to bed. Let’s all go to bed and figure this out in the morning

I HAVE TO DO THE WORK SO THAT MY LIFE CAN BE DIFFERENT AND I CAN REAP THE BENEFITS

nothing will ever amaze me the way fanfiction authors do. like, you wrote silly little stories about my favorite little guys? and i can read them?? for free??? that’s fucking wild.

you poured your heart and soul and very being into your writing and then put it out there for anyone to read? insane.

you spend a truly incredible amount of time writing novel-length, high quality stories, again, FOR FREE, that anyone can read, again, FOR FREE??

shoutout to every single fic author in existence, you guys are fucking incredible and i love all of you so much

It just sucks so bad. 21, the age at which i realized i was trans, isnt at all "too late" to realize, but it sucks so bad what our society, what the institution of transphobia, gets away with. The lie it forced on me for so long. I feel like i had so many moments when i could have easily realized i was trans as far back as about five years old when i saw something on the news about a trans girl and at the same time i was having thoughts like "What if reincarnation was real but you had to be a boy every time and could never be born as a girl?? Wouldnt that suuuuuck???", but they want you to think it could never be you. And it worked on me!!! Between my family and our society, i was conditioned to think that while it was totally Okay for somebody to be trans, it could Never be me, and i shouldnt even think about it unless i was 100% sure since birth- which, on some level, i believe i even was! But what they Want you to believe is that all trans people know without a doubt that theyre trans from birth, a lie which suppresses so many transgender people out of ever being happy. When i was in my teens i even had two friends who came out as transfem, and i was really happy for them, but even more, i was jealous. I wished i could be trans so that i could be as happy as they were! I wished i could experience that! But it just never clicked for me that i could easily have that just as easily as them. It was all about overcoming this feeling that society instills in you, that it could never be you. And the fact that even well meaning people perpetuate these sentiments is appalling. When my dad was accepting of me but also made sure to ask me How Sure I Was, he was himself a microcosm of what society worries itself with foremost- Are You Sure You're Trans? Have you wrung out every other possibility? Are you sure youll make it? They busy you with doubts and fears, because ultimately they of course want to dupe you out of it. They express possibly genuine and well meaning concern for your wellbeing and happiness without letting you make up your own mind. Railroading you into the mindset that if it was You, you would have realized long ago.

its september time to build a new life

This has been driving me insane.

I used to be *good* at search. It was a whole thing - I found people's "lost songs" or their unknown-source childhood stuffed toy or whatever from Google.

Now, you can't search for the exact brand/design name of something and get accurate answers. It drives me spare on Amazon - if I search for XYZ and you don't have any, or you only have 2, tell me that.

I wouldn't mind if it said "Here are 2 XYZ. Shoppers also searched for..." Instead it'll just throw a random, barely-linked pile of results and you have to wade through every single one to see if the thing you want exists.

THIS. For ages I used to say that I had "high Google-Fu". I could find *anything* because I knew how to use strings to enhance searches. The string commands haven't even worked for well over a year or more, far before they put in this infernal (and often wrong!) AI BS on top.

I used to be able to search for recipes and easily eliminate unwanted ingredients with a -. For example I'd look for low-carb desserts but without the zillions that use peanut butter simply by searching for something like:

low carb chocolate dessert recipe -peanut

And I'd get a slew of on-point suggestions. For some time now if you do -peanut Google ignores the - and assumes you want recipes stuffed with peanuts.

Where it's even worse now is now you get directed to sites full of bogus AI recipes that don't even make sense. But they have peanuts in them.

I used to be able to use reverse image searches to find out who made that awesome art so I could give credit in my share. They've removed that ability entirely and replaced it with Lens, which is AI BS just showing you more like what you looked for. (Rebecca Watson complained about this in her recent video about JD Vance jizz cup rumours and I apologise for that sentence but...yeah. Watson is great, go find her on Youtube and subscribe because she went into detail about how Google has become less and less useful for debunking.)

This isn't just about Google inserting shopping ads instead of what you wanted to learn about. That's bad. But the results now are just *broken*. The tools we used to have to make searches better have been removed. Google no longer wants us to find the answers we seek, but the answers they want us to have, and that's super creepy and dangerous.

And the alternatives are either using Google in the back end or have other significant barriers to use.

This sucks.

Duckduckgo and all the other alternatives work this way too, now.