I think so many people are so deeply alienated from themselves that they have no clue how to exercise their free will and autonomy. For some, this alienation runs so deep that they are afraid of their own autonomy and humanity. It is completely understandable why one would have those feelings, but it can be worrisome.

I want to help others who feel this way, so here are small things I have done to exercise my free will:

I don't want to shame anybody for not feeling as though they have free will or that they are exempt from exercising it. However, I wanted to give ideas so that you might read this list and find your own ways to express your intrinsic autonomy and will. You deserve to be a person, to feel alive, not just living. That is what our lives are for.

I really hope the effects of the WGA and SAG strike bleeds into all sorts of entertainment industries, especially the ones that don't have any unions. I want to hear animators, music composers, voice actors, and translators all go on strike.

CGI/VFX artists and video game developers are a couple of creative groups that desperately need to be unionized.

How did I not think of them. Yeah, they DESPERATELY need to be unionized.

"Are you more artistic or scientific" science is art and art is science bitch

"this! im both artistic and scientific" no shut the FUCK up you don't get it

There is no difference. None. Science and art are both fueled by passion and romance. They are cycles of understanding, intimacy, and expression that have no beginning or end, that sustain one another in a wheel. Without artistic passion there would be no science. Without scientific understanding there would be no art. They are the exact same wonder and amazement with the world around us expressed through different yet interdependent media.

Next person to reply to this like "op is right BUT they are different in this pedantic way" get blown up

what about business majors?

kill on sight

YOU WOULDN'T KILL MY OC HARPER HUANG....... HE MAJORED IN BUSINESS AND OWNS A LIL CAFE 🥺🥺🥺🥺

I would curb stomp your OC in front of his gay little cafe for what he did

One thing about me is I would always prefer the found family be unhealthily codependent little freaks than “grow up” and become people that only see each other or talk on special occasions. I want them ENMESHED in each other’s lives PERMANENTLY.

I love this❤️🧡💛💚💙💜

This is why "rainbow capitalism" is fine with me. Not just because I grew up and lived in a time period when this kind of gesture would have been unthinkable; not just because it shows that companies (whose attention is always on their bottom line) see the way society is moving and choose which is the more bigger and profitable side to be on (although both of those are also good reasons!)

Because I want bigots to be uncomfortable. I want them to be reminded daily that they are losing. I want them to not be able to buy beer or go to a movie or eat a burger without it being RUBBED IN THEIR FACE that they are sad and pathetic and no one likes them. I want them to have things they love gradually stripped away from them until they are reduced to only buying weird bible-themed chips that taste like sawdust. I want them to realize how much they are losing out on by holding on to their bigoted beliefs, and how much it costs them, and have that knowledge eat them up inside while they drink their off-brand Discount Joe's Root Beer because they haven't heard anything about Discount Joe supporting The Gays yet, so it's fine.

This this this.

Rainbow capitalism does not mean that international mega-corporations are on our side. They very much are not; they are on the money side.

It's not that they have decided "oh hey, the queers have money." The queers have always had money. The communities of outcasts and freaks and oppressed minorities have always been willing to focus their resources on their active supporters.

But until recently, "put queer labeling on your products" has meant "the mainstream will avoid you." Sure, there were queer dollars to chase, but it wasn't worth losing straight dollars to get them.

They didn't dip their labels in the rainbow glitter pool until it was profitable. Until most of their customers - who are most definitely straight and oblivious to queer issues entirely - would not care if they have a month of rainbow-themed merchandise. Would either ignore it or find it entertaining.

Which means: Every MAGAt you see yelling about "never gonna buy this crap again! Gonna boycott everything with a rainbow on the label! Gonna boycott every company I can find that has a DEI tab on their website!"... is part of the loud-but-insignificant minority.

If Budweiser and Coors thought that most Republicans would actually stop drinking them, they wouldn't have rainbows on the bottles.

You can't trust beer companies to be allies. They are absolutely not our friends, not our supporters. But you can damn well trust their marketing departments to go after profits.

The problem with writing a fantasy story where they have computers that are powered by magic is that computers are already magic.

Seriously. Moreso than any other subject I know, computers are the ultimate bell-curve, where people who don't know much about how they work and people who know a lot about how they work both agree: they're magic.

Like, do you know how we make computers? We etch intricate patterns in crystals. Using light. The shape of the drawings determines how they work.

Seriously, that's how they're made. We grow super-pure crystals, cut them into wafers, cover them with acid, then shine a light on them through a mask to activate or deactivate the acid, etching away some of the silicon surface. It's called photolithography.

Only we've since decided light is "too big" and we've moved up to using x-rays, which are smaller. This lets us fit smaller drawings on our crystals!

The best part is that because some processes use light to harden the photoresist layer and some processes use light to break it down, it means some computers are made of light (because the parts of the crystal that got light on them remained behind) and some parts are made of shadow (because the parts that got light were washed away.)

Do you have a Light CPU or a Shadow CPU? You'll probably never know. This is industrial secret stuff.

And because we're making them with light, we can make them tiny and we can make lots at once. Like, I found a reference once that said that MOSFETs (a type of electrical switch) is the single thing Humanity has made the most of over our entire time on this planet.

How many have we made, exactly? It's estimated that between 1960 and 2018, we made about 13 SEXTILLION of them.

That's 13,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

If every human alive (all 8 billion of us) lived to 70 and devoted our whole lives to making them, never sleeping, just making MOSFETs, we'd have to make 736 a second to make 13 sextillion MOSFETs.

Computers are magic. And we're very good at being wizards.

the best part about polls is that by now most poll takers are on some level aware of the... the meta of polls. i'm aware that the fourth option out of five or six is most commonly chosen; i know that the final selection of polls with options that are all the same word are most likely to be chosen; i know that people like to be goofy, and will choose the silliest option. no one's voting blindly anymore because the prevalence of these polls is manipulating how we approach them. we're all playing a game together, trying to guess public consensus, trying to contribute. its just another aspect of this website thats defined by collaboration and its fascinating and so so so cool

It’s blown my mind how well-regulated we somehow manage to be with polls like “get both answers to 50%”

a thing that i want people talking about the past to remember is that people in the past lied. like, not "were wrong" or "didn't have the context for" but "told untruths that they knew were untruths." yes, in chronicles and histories. especially in diplomatic texts. extra especially in political works.

this doesn't mean the historian can discount those sources as sources, of course! but it does mean that they should not be taken at face value and replicated in the text of a modern history.

watch historians of the distant future cite sources from the ancient texts of twitter like these were real-time accounts of events!! well uh yes but...

genuinely i think about this all the time. maybe in this case the impermanence of server storage will work for us and future historians just won't have twitter. is this the optimal case? probably not. is it better than historians taking twitter shitposts literally? probably.

i think about this a lot when i hatewatch "ancient aliens"

ok ok ok yes AND historians totally get that people are people, even in the past, and they're going to lie about stupid (and sometimes not so stupid) shit

there are whole techniques on how to circumvent bias and outright lies and get at/near the truth

and if a future historian were handed Twitter? Just straight up Twitter? as a source for our modern times??

it would be a fucking GIFT

yes people lie all over Twitter but then there are people taking apart those lies in lengthy tweet-threads and others giving necessary context and you can start sussing out who's full of shit and who isn't, which historical events were more prone to straight up lies and which weren't -

I don't think y'all get how amazing it is that a vast swath of humanity just talks about whatever's on their minds, in public.

i just - imagine if we'd had Twitter at any time in the past, how much more whole and complete a picture we'd have of their culture and happenings. Because those lies tell us something, too -- it tells us what they valued.

hey I have some advice for people that wish they could do more to support artists but maybe can’t do as much financially!!!

Literally, nothing makes my day more than a comment that’s really taken the time to analyze my art and describe WHAT about it they liked. this is really helpful for artists for a couple reasons:

Don’t get me wrong, I love all comments. I love people who I can tell make an effort to comment something, even if it’s just a keysmash or incoherent wailing or a simple “I really like this op!” I also LOVE comments that are funny “op you are feeding me like a baby bird” (I have a little folder for screenshots of my favorites heehee).

But, again, it is really appreciated when people give specific, analytic comments. those are comments that turn me into a weeping little puddle. And this is not a “if you never ever comment you’re evil” post, it’s just saying if you do, we notice and thank you for it!

Withdrawing from school was probably one of the best individual decisions i've ever made in my life, for reasons too numerous to list here, but I have obtained vital wisdom that I will share here:

Log off and talk to old people

Your brain is being microwaved by exposure to almost exclusively under-30s who don't get outside very much. There's nothing inherently wrong with being young or indoors, but it's really starting to click for me that your 20's are a garbage fire, and no one in their 20's knows shit (including me). We are all just so unfinished and terrified and confused.

You need role models that are older than you. If your role models are all your age you're admiring a lot of people that have fewer challenges than you, and not very many people that used to be like you and bloomed.

It won't click for you until you make friends with "boomers" who are the most blisteringly self-actualized people you've ever seen, actively involved in their communities, cool and thoughtful and full of stories, and 80% of the things that seem important to you burn away. You Will Be Okay.

Let me tell you a secret: The bigger part of the fight for good in this wretched world is invisible to the internet, rippling past without surfacing on Twitter or Instagram.

I'm organizing right now to launch a "re-wilding" project around my hometown, and joining forces with a lady who runs a native plant giveaway sort of thing, and she [coolest person ever] [gives off the powerful aura of a level 999 human] doesn't have a cell phone let alone the internet

I'm here to tell you that there are a billion awesome things in your community for you to join with, and it seems to you like they don't exist, simply because the people that run them don't know how to social media

f.f.f. (farmer family friend) is the president of the farmers market in his hometown and they have a facebook page and that's basically it and i'm like, there are so many farmers markets that 20somethings don't know about, aren't there...

But if you talk to a person like this and say "hey i wanna grow native trees/start a community garden/grow a food forest" chances are you will get pelted with connections to 75 other people who are exactly who you need to talk to

There's a guy who just started where I work who is interested in urban and suburban food forests, and because of my brother's volunteer work, I happen to know that a local food bank is about to buy land to start farming on, and I tell him "Here, here's this guy's number, talk to him he'll be SUPER excited to hear what you have to say" and then I think to myself "Networking? Is this networking? EEEEE!"

And listen...

you, a Young Person, may be ALSO just as vital to these not-as-internet-adept folks who are doing good work, because YOU can get THEM connected to all the folks on the internets and link them to resources THEY can't access

Happy Halloween!! Eat lots of candy and stuff!!!

I love Tumblr’s holiday traditions.

‘tis the season, time to reblog pocketss halloween flight rising comic

Long live the pumpkin dragons!

I think the best part of Murderbot is its staunch belief that it’s average at its job, and it only does better because it doesn’t have a working governor module

It’s always like, I’m just a SecUnit, the only reason I’m better is because humans somehow have worse judgement than me in my very narrow field of expertise, and I have the ability to process multiple things at once, and I don’t die when I get my shit wrecked. None of these are advantages over other bots, so I’m actually just average as far as skills go.

Meanwhile, Murderbot’s track record is something like ‘regularly takes out other SecUnits, regularly hacks fairly complicated systems, takes out multiple hostiles while saving and protecting clients/hostages, beat two Combat Bots in succession, and went toe to toe with a Combat SecBot while taking out two other SecUnits, rounding it off with inhabiting spaceships and crushing the incredibly difficult and malicious killware infecting them.’

That’s not even counting the guts, skill, and determination it takes to hack your own hardware/code which is fully capable of frying your brain in the first place

Something I love is that a large chunk of Murderbot’s success is just - it literally asks for help?

There’s a line in Exit Strategy, “Bots are instructed to report and repel theft attempts, but no one ever tells them not to answer polite requests from other bots.”

Murderbot makes use of this a lot. It talks to other bots, like ART and Miki. It offers equal trades of assistance, like with the Combat SecUnit in Exit Strategy, SecUnit 3 in Network Effect, and the ComfortUnit in Rogue Protocol.

In Exit Strategy, it reached out to the human supervisors to get Dr. Mensah an opening to get onto the shuttle. Even at the very beginning, in All Systems Red, it warns the team about the external combat over-ride.

Murderbot makes itself out to be a natural loner, but ‘ask for help’ has literally been one of it’s go-to strategies since book 1. And I think that’s beautiful.

#murderbot would be very upset to know that its superpower is friendship (tags via hoarder-of-stories-27)

so true

God, someone needs to gif the exact millisecond Hob looks up and sees Dream for the first time in 1389 (there's even a note in the soundtrack like a pin dropping) because you can barely see it with his friend's back blocking a lot of the shot but Ferdinand Kinglsey does the absolute best "First time laying eyes on your soulmate" face I think I've ever seen

In the spirit of a quick "Hob Gadling microexpressions" liveblog, it's no wonder people read Hob's reaction to "Because I'm interested," in 1489 as assuming Dream's propositioning him sexually. The little motion Hob does, pulling his shoulders inward as if shielding himself, almost as if pulling a cloak more tightly around his shoulders absolutely to my eyes reads as the reaction of someone who was just told that if they really want to get this role in the movie, they're going to have to sleep with the casting director. Like that as a nobleman or otherwise powerful being and the person who gave Hob immortality, it seems entirely plausible to Hob that Dream at this moment would lay some kind of claim on his body in recompense, it's a very sexually vulnerable microexpression on Hob's face like he expects this but he is frightened of it too.

It probably doesn't help that Dream's voice makes everything sound vaguely seductive so being "interested" in Hob sounds extremely explicit. In fact, when Dream redirects Hob's expectations, telling him nothing is owed except for Hob to "tell him what it's like" you can see Hob needing to recalculate. He is more comfortable now that the request doesn't appear to be a physical one (or for his soul) but you can tell for a moment there at the beginning he really had no idea what the price was going to be for immortality and he was prepared for some absolutely horrific possibilities.

Actually, final note on 1489 but I was thinking about how confident Hob is in 1389 compared to how nervous he is in 1489 and I can't help but think of how nervewracking the last 100 years must have been for Hob. He's had no answers as to why he's suddenly immortal, it would have been years before he realized he wasn't aging (not a lot of good mirrors back then!) and perhaps that injuries don't stick around for long. All he's got is a conversation with a kind of sexy weirdo in a tavern that doesn't even last a minute and that any reasonable person would assume is a joke. I mean, he rightfully asks if this is all some kind of game and IMO, Dream lies when he says it isn't, unless he's splitting hairs because it's a wager not a game, or the game is with Death not with Hob, who is the object of the game.

So then Hob's got 100 years of trying to figure out, on his own, wtf happened. Assuming he made a bargain with the Devil is, for his time and background, absolutely the most reasonable explanation! Poor man must have worried himself down to the bone in the lead up to their 100 year reunion wondering if there would be anyone there waiting with answers, wondering what happened to him, why he's outliving everyone he knows. No wonder he's so confident in 1589 when he's finally got some reassurance that all he has to do is report back to Dream what all of this living forever business is like and that he's started thinking of Dream as a friend and benefactor instead of, as he surely would have between 1389 and 1489, as potentially the destroyer of Hob's hope for salvation or some horrible punishment waiting around the corner at his centennial to otherwise demand something horrible of him in return that he didn't know he'd bargained for. JFC, poor guy!

Ok in the interest of making this systematic, quick glance at 1589 Hob. I've mentioned before that I think Dream is an ass here for being so disdainful of Hob's success, Hob literally pulled himself up from nothing in the last 100 years and it's actually incredibly impressive for his time and place, even if he'd gained that wealth as a multi-generational family instead of as an individual, to have the Queen sleep at his house but THAT ASIDE...

... I think Hob shows a great deal of maturity in the final glimpse we get of him. Dream has clearly crushed Hob's hopes of getting some kind of positive acknowledgment from his benefactor for Hob's accomplishments (I try not to think about whether Hob was able to push himself forward in this past 100 years by looking forward to Dream's reaction, because then I will either cry or find a way to punch Dream). BUT! Hob rallies. He rallies pretty quickly actually, he is nothing if not incredibly resilient, perhaps his actual superpower, because he shrugs off Dream's hurtful apathy and refocuses on living his life for himself. Now, if you ship them, I actually still think this is a really important moment because it shows that Dream is very important to Hob but Hob is not codependent on Dream. He makes the correct choice from that point forward to stop worrying about what Dream thinks about what he does or how he lives his life and just abide by the letter of their agreement: to report back to Dream every century. It sets up his very understandable annoyance in 1789 when Dream suddenly does have an opinion on Hob, deserved as it may be.

as much as i love it when a character's love is literally earth shattering i honestly prefer it when they lose someone or something they care about in really tragic and unfair circumstances and are like actually i'm not going to make any innocent people suffer for this. i'm just going to take it up directly with the guy in charge. and then they go and literally beat the shit out of god or death or the universe or whatever until they give them back what they want.

guy who has a customer complaint but refuses to harass the employees about it and instead just heads straight for the CEO's office and kicks down the door with a list of grievances and a guillotine

Btw, I am obsessed with The Sandman's portrayal of divinity more then anything else.

This is probably why the Hell episode was my favorite. The transformation battle? Yeah, o k San-Wu-Kong!

But the best part was the "what power have dreams in Hell?" "what power would hell have if those in it couldn't dream of heaven?" exchange.

Because of the way the power dynamic shifted in it. It was a brief philosophical exchange, where Devil starts on top, assured they can keep Dream in Hell, but ends up defeated after his retort. The acting really sells this dynamic there.

It feels the same way their "fight" did, minus the visual representation of their "blows". Because it was! They are gods! Manifestations of their respective abstract concepts! For them philosophy, a clash of ideas, should be no different from physical throwing of hands! Like Greeks!

I hope, I'm making sense here. Essentially, what I'm saying is that for these guys, talking or just simply existing in a place seems as much of an extention of their divinity as their fancy magics, and can carry just as much, if not more meaning and power.

Speaking of - the magic. It is amazing. Vague and without many internal rules, it still makes sense for certain things and ppl to produce effects they do.

Most blatantly - it is not described what exactly Dream's tools do. Even the functionality of the Ruby, which gets the most exposition (read - any), is "makes dreams come true" with no hows and conditions attached. But still, when they are put to use I go "yeah, ok, I see how that would do that" and don't feel cheated.

I don't have analytical eloquence to understand why it works, but it does, and it makes gods in The Sandman feel exactly the same way gods in mythology do, minus the age of the text. Which is fantastic.

I find it odd how some in the sandman fandom make Hob Gadling out to be the embodiment of goodness. The point of him is that he is human. yes he loves life, so much so that he doesn’t die. But he still falls into the traps of human cruelty. He has human greatness and kindness. But he also has human flaws and ignoring that would be missing the point of him