You can’t deserve a person’s love. You’ll drive yourself crazy thinking like that. They either love you, or they don’t. That doesn’t mean you weren’t good enough for them to love you, because love isn’t something you earn by being good enough. It isn’t something that can be quantified or doled out. Don’t blame yourself for not being loved how you need to, just teach yourself how to look for love where love lives.

This isn’t just about romantic love, or even skewed towards romantic love, although it does apply there too. One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to accept is that my mother simply wasn’t someone who was capable of loving me, and there is no version of me that I could have ever been that would have earned that love. But with acceptance came healing. I was able to love myself more instead of resenting myself for not being more than any one person could be.

Are you listening? Even love for yourself isn’t earned. It is a kindness you give yourself.

DAMN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

thinking about when i got heat exhaustion at the House on the Rock and the experience was so overwhelming that i had a panic attack and thought i was hearing ghosts and genuinely fully believed i was going to die

which sounds like an overreaction, unless you've ever been to house on the rock and then you probably understand exactly what i'm saying.

imagine it's 90 some degrees and you havent had any water all day and you've just walked through not one, or two, but three fake towns,

past a 200 foot tall whale,

through multiple rooms of animatronics and mannequins,

and you havent seen sunlight for almost five hours and you're getting dizzy and then you walk through the mouth of a fake devil and end up staring at this

and this just goes on and on and on in a maze and every single one of these organs is playing music and some of them have animatronics on them playing and you can't find the exit and sweat is literally pouring off of you and finally you turn down another hallway and instead of an exit it looks like this

and at this point your vision is blurring and you feel like your heart is beating out of your chest but every turn just brings you to more h r geiger ass hallways of organs and theyre all still blaring

bro thay put transgender in me

you’re good queen. i mispelt “they”. Some kind of yrbasgender i am. i deserve to have it suques out of me likr a ksoquito

PLEASE for the love of the universe read anti-colonial science fiction and fantasy written from marginalized perspectives. Y’all (you know who you are) are killing me. To see people praise books about empire written exclusively by white women and then turn around and say you don’t know who Octavia Butler is or that you haven’t read any NK Jemisin or that Babel was too heavy-handed just kills me! I’m not saying you HAVE to enjoy specific books but there is such an obvious pattern here

Some of y’all love marginalized stories but you don’t give a fuck about marginalized creators and characters, and it shows. Like damn

If anyone has any recommendations give them to me please!

Gladly! The pieces on this list aren’t limited to specifically anti-colonial science fiction and fantasy, but they do center related and relevant topics, themes, etc.

Severely underhyped books of assorted speculative genres:

Read widely. Read diversely. People of the Caucasian persuasion need to stop getting pissy when the story doesn’t immediately center them and they don’t automatically relate to everything the character says and does and is. Just let yourself get swept in the story—even if it touches on (gasp!) racism—and maybe, just maybe, it’ll reveal something to you.

Or maybe not! Marginalized sff authors do not have to and should not have to educate their readers. But if I see one more white person complain about how Black characters are fundamentally annoying because they complain too much I’m going to fling myself into the sun

Thanks for coming to my ted talk I didn’t want to do it but here I am

Don't forget Aliette de Bodard! Especially her Xuya and Dominion of the Fallen series.

Zen Cho is my other favorite - Sorcerer to the Crown and The True Queen, and also Black Water Sister.

Great list! I will also recommend anything by Samuel R. Delany.

Also reccing P. Djèlí Clark's books, especially Ring Shout, which is like "what if Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a black woman and the KKK was still the KKK but now they're literal horrifying monsters as well as figuratively so". It's SO BADASS.

others to add!!

The Unbroken by CL Clark

ANYTHING by Nghi Vo, not just Empress of Salt and Fortune; When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain and the rest of the Singing Hills cycle, which EoSaF starts, are incredible as well as The Chosen and the Beautiful (an adaptation of the Great Gatsby).

Mexican Gothic and The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, both by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Song of Silver, Flame like Night like Amelie Wen Zhao

Nothing but Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw

ANYTHING by Tasha Suri but especially The Jasmine Throne and its sequel The Oleander Sword

THE LIST KEEPS GOING YOU GUYS

Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction. It’s a sci-fi anthology “showcasing the breadth of fantasy and science fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora” I cannot recommend this book enough everything in it is an absolute banger

The Memory Librarian: and other stories of Dirty Computer. Based on Janelle Monáe’s album, Doet Computer it’s a sci-fi anthology of stories from that world. It’s really fucking good I’m a big fan of musicians doing world building with their music and she really takes it to the next level with this book. You don’t necessarily need to know the story of Dirty Computer to read this but I would highly recommend.

The Machine Mandate series by Benjanun Sriduangkaew. I have never seen mastery of language like this and the world she’s built out is fucking incredible. All 10 (? I think. There’s 6 main books and a couple prequel) are so beautiful and I think all novellas.

I will absolutely second anything by Samuel R Delaney. I’m particularly partial to Empire Star, Driftglass and Babel-17. He’s my favourite author of all time and everything I’ve read by him is so good. The kind where you finish the story and you have to sit there for 3-5 business days to really absorb it.

2024 achievements

English added by me :)

the nuisance of our language is stunning

ahh but true slavs know they all have slightly different meanings ;)

english sucks because they have like 3 swear words combined

@one-time-i-dreamt can you answer this?

jebati - fuck someone

podjebavati - to screw around with someone

zajebavati - same as above but more joking and lighthearted

zajebati - fuck something up or fuck someone over

izjebati - could mean to fuck someone good or fuck someone up lol

ujebati - made a mistake

razjebati - break something

sjebati - fucked something up, made a mistake

nadjebavati - outsmart someone

jebuckati - to talk minor shit, also a more innocent way to say fuck

odjebati - ditch someone

najebati - get in trouble

prejebati - screw someone over, do something sneaky (bad)

dojebati - move somewhere, often said about people from rural areas moving to big towns

my personal fav - nejebica - state of fucklessness

"syntax error: unclosed if at line 56": perfect error message, tells me exactly what I need to fix and exactly where to look for it.

"memory write failure at address 0xeb008a": good error message. describes the problem well enough to enable troubleshooting by an experienced user.

"something went wrong, please try again": bad error message. does not tell me anything useful.

"oops! something blooped! 🙁": I will kill you with my bare teeth

socks used to cheat on civil service exams, Qing Dynasty China

Disgust has absolutely no ethical weight. If you are basing your ethical positions on the emotion of disgust you should stop, it is entirely unjustified and leads to a huge amount of harm.

Word for today: wisdom of repugnance

The logical fallacy that because something disgusts you it must be bad

this is probably the funniest example of a tumblr user simply not reading the post theyre reblogging at all

me standing in the living room: this room does not look.... straight

the room:

i'm pretty sure there is not a single straight line in this apartment btw like even my front door is at an angle

Hey OP, do you live in a funhouse?

well i am a clown so

in its defence i am like... 85%? sure the floor is level.

i make no such claims about the ceiling but it's hard to tell bc they're 2m90 / 9ft 6 high and i am so very far away from them

sat on the toilet like. oh yeah. there are zero straight lines in here

lads i'll not lie. rendering my living room to scale is......... not better

standards have dropped so low that i just said the walk in cupboard was straight bc the right wall is only 2cm longer than the left and the back only 3cm longer than the front

99% sure this is the straightest part of the whole flat and it's a cupboard

measuring everything in here so i can render it properly to plan furniture and my god there are so many angles

so far of the forty (40) angles ive measured... 2 of them are actual right angles

i still have 2 rooms to go

a grand total of 3 right angles exist in this apartment

i did have to do this plan AGAIn bc the blueprint software kept adjusting all the lengths and angles to try and make it make sense so i had to do every room separately and stitch them together the reality is somehow worse

there's a man coming wednesday to do an energy efficiency report that involves taking the dimensions of the rooms and i am SO EXCITED to see bill's soul leave his body

"How can platonic BDSM be a thing". It's whatever Sam Reich is doing to his friends on Game Changer actually.

You can see someone else also using the devices' second seat, and I think that's so cool. Mobility devices help everyone, here other employees also get a chance to sit while they're working. I just love mobility aids, man. It's like the cut curb effect

This setup is obviously so much more convenient than every alternative, gives him so much natural freedom back and is such an effective thing to rest on in general that I'm mad it hasnt always been a standard kind of everyday furniture. We're wasting so much ceiling space.

Also I appreciate that it allows him to go WHEEE and spin around which I think is crucial

As someone who dropped out of culinary school because I couldn't focus due to the pain, I feel intense things about this.

this is my robotnik mspaint comic thank you for your time

This took me a lot longer than I anticipated - partly cuz I had surgery on my neck & couldn't sew for very long due to pain and partly cuz I had to redo the helmet parts so much to get it to look how I wanted & get it to rotate over 3 faces on my updated plushie bot pattern .....

Blitzwing is not for sale. I'm giving this plush to his VA, I've wanted to meet Bumper Robinson ever since the show aired 😅💦💦

The last time I did a 3-face Animated Blitzwing was 15 years ago 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

If you like what I do, please support me on Ko-Fi! thank you

ko-fi.com/shatteredneedle

i’m proud of the ten people in vermont who recognized what was at stake, recognized that great is the enemy of good, held their nose, and voted for joe biden

#stillwithher