honestly i fully understand why Dick Grayson dropped out of college, if i was the most competent teenager in the world and some other teenager attempted to use a trump tweet as evidence for a debate about law or a professor tried to flex their authority over me and pull me into their office to give me a lecture on keeping my priorities straight and actually attend class when i was actually out secretly saving the world i too would say, fuck this actually, and dip
while i slouched, nearly stooping, suddenly there came a booping, as of someone gently booping, booping at my chamber door. tis some mutual, i said, booping at my chamber door. only this and nothing more.
this aged REALLY well
I think one of the funniest things to see in Star Wars fandom is this idea that Anakin and Padme would actually genuinely be good for each other and be a happy, healthy couple if only Anakin didn't go dark or if only Palpatine hadn't manipulated them or something along those lines.
And I'm over here like "based on what common values and interests?"
The things they share the most in common are the things that make them TOXIC, it's the very traits they share that lead them to their shared doom and destruction. Their shared selfishness, greed, and ambition is what allows them to throw aside their ideals in order to be together no matter the cost. Their shared willingness to ignore reality in favor of what they WANT to believe is what allows their situation to continue to deteriorate.
Padme fights for democracy, and Anakin believes in dictatorships.
Padme wants a large family because she has fond memories of her childhood with her own family, and Anakin wants one person whose life revolves around him and him alone.
Padme (usually) believes in mercy and justice, and Anakin believes in might makes right.
What about them would make anyone think they'd actually ever be a functional couple when the only stuff they have in common are the lies they tell themselves about each other?
They would be terrible parents. Anakin would resent the twins for taking attention away from him and Padme would be frustrated that they aren't perfectly behaved at all times. And the twins, being Force-sensitive, would pick up on all those negative feelings and internalize them. The results would be... unpleasant, in a variety of possible directions.
Personally, I think Anakin would still Fall. Acting as if it could ONLY be possible in that one specific instance shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the character. I just hope the kids aren't around when he finally loses his temper for good. I would hope Padme might scrape together enough common sense to get them out of there before/when it happens, but she doesn't have the best track record on that score.
To Boop - either tap the boop button next to someone's name or go to their blog and tap the cat paw icon
To Super Boop - go to someone's blog and hold the cat paw icon until it spins once, then let go
To Evil Boop - go to someone's blog and hold the cat paw icon until it spins twice, then let go
Can't Boop - either you or the person you're trying to Boop hasn't opted in yet
To Opt In - go to your feed and you'll see the boop-o-meter and the option to opt in
I'll update this when I know how to get certain badges and such.
I'm not sure what triggers it, but if you keep booping enough, you'll get a "you high-fived the cat"
After that, go to your notifications tab and you'll find a notification that says "the cat booped you back"
Tap the "Meow :3" on that notification
Next, you'll get a notification from yourself and that mentions a "boop laundering scheme" and then gives you the option to Boop yourself.
to High Five the Cat, tap the paw animation that appears after you boop someone.
Also; Super Boops and Evil Boops both only count as 1 boop for your boop-o-meter, despite the increased number of paw animations.
But, that can be useful if you're having a hard time tapping the paw animation before it disappears...
- A regular boop only has 1 paw animation that comes out of a random side
- A super boop has 2 paw animations that come out of parallel sides
- An evil boop has 4 paw animations, one for each side
Not useful really, but interesting:
The paw animation changes every 10 Boops. One is a ghost paw, one is a skeleton paw, and one is a mummy paw.
Missing Information
I am currently unsure of:
- How to get "LOL" on the boop-o-meter
- How to get "OMG" on the boop-o-meter
- How to get "MAX" for sent Boops on the boop-o-meter
- What triggers the Color Change of the boop-o-meter
I will update with more info once I know more and confirm the information as best I can.
On desktop, clicking the cat on the meter puts a boop in both columns, and is the fastest way to accumulate boops.
There are no new badges, but if you didn't get any of the badges on April Fool's Day, you can get them today. I got the black cat paw!
Ah, okay! I was wondering about the badges!
Crunchyroll is going to be in heaps of legal trouble soon
I realise this meme is like half a decade old at this point, but I keep running into folks who are only familiar with the screaming cowboy part of Kirin J Callinan’s “Big Enough”, and you… really, really need to see it in context. I promise the context does not diminish it.
I feel like the video raises further questions
I dunno, I think “ex-rival gunslingers falling in gay cowboy love as a metaphor for world peace” is a pretty straightforward thesis.
I drew up a list of Kid’s chronology across DCMK 1) because I think Kaito’s position in DCMK canon is incredibly funny, and 2) as a reference for future me with regards to point 1. Since I made it, I figured I may as well share it…
It’s kinda fun to see the timing of when certain cases were released compared to the movies. MK’s Black Star being published as Movie 3 went to theaters, for example, makes the whole thing feel like a celebration.
He's never happy
5 years ago, I was in Rehab.
10 years ago, I was watching my Potential and Opportunities dissolve and evaporate in an ocean of cheap gin and expensive whiskey.
But 5 years ago, I was in Rehab.
One of the exercises they had us perform was to imagine ourselves happy, 5 years in the future.
Many of us in that room had forgotten how to imagine nice things happening to them. A few snorted (well, I snorted), finding the notion that we’d even still be around in 5 years grimly humorous.
For about half of us, it was the last stop on the way down.
But I indulged the therapist. I was there, after all, because I did not want to die. So, I imagined myself, 5 years hence.
Happy.
It came to me all at once; an artistic remix on Norman Rockwell’s Freedom From Want, reframed with myself placing food at the table.
Sunday Dinner At My Place, I answered, when it came my turn to share my fantasy. I was asked what food I imagined eating.
It’s not the meal itself, I said, it’s the implications framed around it. Sunday Dinner At My Place means that I have a Place. It means that I have Family that will actually speak to me and friends who actually want to see me. It means money enough not just to feed myself but others too. It means having the time to spare to take the time preparing the meal.
A lot of nodding heads all around me. A struck chord. Many people with no Place, in that place. Nowhere that would lament their leaving.
5 years hence, as I lay down to sleep in my Home, with my Wife and my Son, surrounded by my Art and my Flowers, I reflect.
It was a long road. It was hard. We lost people. So many people. There were long days and long nights and hospital stays. Angry arguments with ghosts. I changed, in ways I never hoped for, or expected. Good ways, finally, for once. Slowly, against the backdrop of a world in chaos, I found my mind.
Sometimes, My Wife wondered aloud, what she did to deserve me. After some stumbling with my feelings, I eventually settled on an answer.
I’m a Rescue.
She gave me a Home.
And, so, I gave her a Family.
It seemed fair
This Sunday, my folks, which whom I have not had a shouting match in years, will come over for dinner. We will cook and eat together. My Friend became My Wife, and she took a piece of me and with it she made Our Son. There will be many hugs, and no violence. Good Things Happened.
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you don’t know what the future holds.
It could get good, even.
I met a girl when I was fresh out of high school in undergrad who frankly, annoyed me quite a bit, but I also had an inkling to continue to be compassionate to her given a few things about her life/background/family
I ran into her two years ago. Last week, her daughter turned 1. This girl, let’s called her “P”, is a really good example of why I never feel comfortable mocking trad wives
Her perfect trad husband, who was a shining young figure in the local religious community, volunteered in all sorts of groups, well loved in his workplace and everything else, beat her up at 1 month post-partum. I reached out to her after seeing her desperately asking for a stroller on a page, confused and slightly concerned knowing both of them came from wealthy backgrounds.
The reality for lots of tradwives living “perfect lives” is this: P was immediately ostracised. All the wealth of her husband and her family meant absolutely nothing if she wasn’t in favour and doing what she was told. Her child and her well-being didn’t matter. P, at 25 years old, was basically deemed an oopsie, and left on her own to figure out how to pay for herself, a baby, find housing, and every other task you can think of.
Having known many of these women (and supported many of these women), another factor most people don’t consider is this: they are intentionally raised to be helpless. When I immediately offered my support to P, she really needed it. This young woman needed to be guided through how to apply for government assistance, how to weigh up rentals and apply for them, how to apply for jobs, how to sign up for childcare. How to sign up for your own power and internet, and how to connect them.
It wasn’t that she was “stupid”, or incapable, or spoiled. While it looks like they’re being sheltered, in reality, these women are practically being held hostage. Sure, they might be allowed to learn things that are expected of them (see: basic cooking, baking, cleaning, child rearing, women’s bible studies, hosting, and so forth) but they are heavily controlled from family life into marriage life, and they are never given the opportunity or the reality of what many of us would consider basic adult tasks.
She’s doing okay now. Her daughter turned 1, is happy and healthy. They live frugally, but they have a roof over their heads and the essentials. I often babysit for her so she can attend counselling, or go to a woman’s support group. She is painfully aware that she has so much to learn about how to live as an adult.
I don’t envy tradwives, but I don’t find any joy in mocking them either. Even when they live the most picturesque lives, they’re also practically living a real life Jenga game. If (and often, when) it comes tumbling down, they’re screwed too, and they often have 0 skills to help themselves or find community (that again, isn’t carefully curated).
I have yet to listen to this podcast episode, but I’ve been recommended it on the topic, and a friend said it really helped shift her thinking about this topic from pure disdain and hatred for these women to understanding the complexities a bit more.
Important:
I think that as this has spread further than I intended, a few people may have missed the original point.
I am not saying that you have to become best friends with tradwives and former tradwives, break bread with them, hype them up and everything they do. I am not saying you have to ignore problematic beliefs they have have held or shared during their time as a tradwife, or that you have to forgive and be super comfortable with them.
What I am saying is that when a tradwife either a) leaves that life or b) shares information from her life that normally would be suppressed, mocking her serves no purpose. If one of these women share that they got beat for burning potatoes slightly, or were given a strict $100 allowance a week to do shopping and not allowed a bank account, or had 5 children back to back and were not allowed pain relief or medical support, I don’t enjoy it when people say things like “what did she expect” “that’s what she gets” “fuck around and find out lol” (such as happened when the ballerina farm article came out)
This just pushes them back towards their cult, or if they were considering leaving, will squash that really quick!
It occurs to me that as much as “humans are the scary ones” fits sometimes, if you look at it another way, humans might seem like the absurdly friendly or curious ones.
I mean, who looked at an elephant, gigantic creature thoroughly capable of killing someone if it has to, and thought “I’m gonna ride on that thing!”?
And put a human near any canine predator and there’s a strong chance of said human yelling “PUPPY!” and initiating playful interaction with it.
And what about the people who look at whales, bigger than basically everything else, and decide “I’m gonna swim with our splashy danger friends!”
Heck, for all we know, humans might run into the scariest, toughest aliens out there and say “Heck with it. I’m gonna hug ‘em.”
“Why?!”
“I dunno. I gotta hug ‘em.”
And it’s like the first friendly interaction the species has had in forever so suddenly humanity has a bunch of big scary friends.
“Commander, we must update the code of conduct to include the humans.” “Why? Are they more aggressive than we anticipated?” “It seems to be the opposite Commander. Just this morning a crewman nearly lost their hand when attempting to stroke an unidentified feline on an unknown world. Their reaction to the attack was to call the creature a “mean kitty” and vow to win it over. Upon inquiry it seems they bond so readily with creatures outside their species that they have the capacity to feel sympathy for an alien creature they have never seen before simply because it appears distressed. I hate to say this commander but we must install a rule to prevent them from endangering their own lives when interacting with the galaxy’s fauna.” “I see what you mean. So be it, from now on no crewman is allowed to touch unknown animals without permission from a superior officer. And send a message to supplies about acquiring one of these “puppies” so that their desire to touch furred predators can be safely sated.
Ehehehe I love this! Every time someone adds a short story to my post it gets like 90% cuter and more epic
Lets be honest, the humans would ignore the hell outta that rule whenever alone.
“So I hear that you’ve just recruited a human for your ship.”
“Yes, it’s the first time that I’ve worked with these species, but they come highly recommended. Say, you’ve worked with a few, what tips can you give me? I’d hate to have some kind of cultural misunderstanding if it’s avoidable.”
“The first rule of working with humans is never leave them unsupervised.”
“Wait, what?”
“I’m serious. Don’t do it. Things. Happen.”
“But wait, I thought that I heard you highly recommended that every crew should have at least one on board?”
“Absolutely, and I stand by that. Humans are excellent innovators, and are psychologically very resilient. If you have a crisis, then a human that has bonded wth your crew properly can be invaluable. Treat your human well and you should get the best out of them as a crew member. Their ability to get on with almost any species is legendary.”
“But Toks, didn’t you just say…”
“The trouble is that they will potentially try to bond with anything. If you leave them unsupervised, you have no idea what kind of trouble they can get themselves into. It was sheer luck that the Fanzorians thought that it was funny that the human picked up the Crown Prince to coo at him.”
“Crown Prince Horram, Scourge of Pixia?”
“The very same. Surprisingly good sense of humour. But don’t even get me started on that one time with the Dunlip. Al-Human wanted to know if they could keep it. As a pet.”
“A Dunlip? You mean the 3 metre tall apex predators from Jowun?”
“Yup. Don’t leave your humans unsupervised.”
“I’ll uh, take that under advisement.”
“Seriously. Get a supply of safe animals for the humans to bond with or they will make their own. I mean, they will try to befriend anything they come across anyway, but without any permanent pets they can get… creative. Don’t even get me started on the time one of them taped a knife to one of our auto-cleaners and named it Stabby. Three weeks in and when we finally caught the wretched thing, half the humans on crew tried to revolt about us “killing” Stabby by removing the knife. “How… how did you resolve that sir?” “Glaxcol made a toy knife out of insulation rubber and strapped that on instead. Quite a creative solution, I suppose.” “And that sated the humans? “Worse.” “Worse?” “They thought it was so funny they made a second one, strapped false eyes on springs to both and held mock battles. Then decided Stabby and Knifey were in love and now none of them will allow the others to stage fights between them any more.”
Hi! Would you ever consider doing that spirited TED talk about why Lovecraft now appeals specifically to the marginalized people he hated? I'm trying to make sense of it myself and it would really help to hear your informed opinion!! Sorry if you have already written about it or if it's maybe too personal! Hope you guys are doing well during the lockdown :)
Yeah, sure.
Lovecraft’s work deals intimately with the pain and fear associated with feeling alienated from your community, your ancestors, and even yourself.
A lot of his stories are about how there is something ‘different,’ about you or the people around you, that fills you with unease, but is also difficult to define. Your family feels malevolent to you; you feel like everyone in your small town is watching you, or has bad intentions towards you; you know that there’s something that just isn’t RIGHT about yourself.
Your community might want to force you into a religion, or even a partnership, that seems unspeakable to you, and which fills you with horror.
Sound familiar?
These themes are relatable to LGBT people, to disabled people, to non-neurotypical people, to biracial people, or to people of color who are being raised in communities in which they are an overwhelming minority.
The Shadow Over Innsmouth is probably Lovecraft’s most famous story. It’s about being trapped in a small town where everyone is a part of a terrifying religion that personally hates you, everyone is being forced into horrifying heterosexual couplings of in which one of the partners is a literal monster, for the purpose of breeding, and in which the protagonist survives, escapes, and the government bluntly condemns his tormentors.
As a gay little kid growing up in conservative Maine, this was big for me.
In the end, the narrator of Shadow Over Innsmouth realizes he’s descended from the cultists of this town, and that he is becoming the thing he previously hated and feared. I also was afraid of never getting out of my town, and one day turning into someone just like the people who made my life miserable. To me, it read like a horrible cautionary tale: get out, and don’t look back. What’s going on here is wrong, and you need to pull yourself away, before the pressures of your family & community turn you into one of them.
But that’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth: a story which features alien miscegenation, sure, but not usually one of the stories that gets specifically called out when people talk abot how racist Lovecraft was.
The White Ape is probably the most racist thing Lovecraft ever wrote (also titled Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family). It’s about a man who goes to Africa, falls in love with an ape, successfully reproduces with it, and then all of his descendants are criminals and madmen, with unpleasant, twisted appearances. It’s told from the POV of one of his more distant descendants, who uncovers this information while researching his own geneology, and, upon discovering that there’s an ape in his lineage, commits suicide by dousing himself in lighter fluid and setting himself on fire.
Yikes.
And yet...this story speaks to me, too. There’s a history of serious alcoholism in my family. My mother was an alcoholic. I asked questions: her father was an alcoholic, and suffered from hallucinations as well. His father was also an alcoholic, and he beat his wife and children savagely. And his parents? I don’t know. No one was ever willing to talk to me about it. But every generation I looked back, there was more abuse, more mental illness, more violence.
The idea that, if I could look back far enough, I could discover a progenitor that had poisoned our entire family was something I dwelled on, as a kid. Would I want to know the truth? Would it make any difference? Would I have some kind of crisis if I found out that I was a descendant of a rapist, or a murderer? How would I react if I learned that I was a part of a cycle of violence and substance abuse that no one before me had managed to escape?
The White Ape is super, super racist, obviously, but it’s not just racist. Taken another way, it’s a story about dysfunction being passed down within a family. It’s a sins-of-the-father story. And if you come from an abusive home, that’s compelling.
Look, Lovecraft was a mega racist. He was also a man who struggled with mental illness his entire life, who had watched both of his parents die in mental asylums, and who never found success in his life. He was afraid all the time, and he wrote about how frightening the world was to him, and how he never felt like he was truly a part of it.
The racism sucks.
The rest of it, if you’re a person who has been mistreated or marginalized, can really resonate.
The feeling that there is something, somehow, cut-into-your-very-bones wrong with you. The constant fear of being found out. The heads of people turning as you pass, filling you with the certainty that they may somehow see you as you don’t want to be revealed. And if you were acted upon, by the universe, would anyone care? Would anyone listen to you or help? Is there even a somewhere to run?
Lovecraft’s characters live in this terrible state of fear. The man himself, racist and shockingly, often bewilderingly bigoted, lived his life in a similar state. One does not excuse the other, nor can you pick Lovecraft’s fears apart from the stories he wrote. But so many of the terrors that run under his work are ones that marginalized people know all too well, and there is a painful sort of meaning, of recognition, in that.
#I've always been resistant to the idea of throwing lovecraft out from the corpus of sff #especially when we've seen such an uptick of incredible bipoc and queer authors taking his stories and themes and spinning them to new gold #mistreated and marginalized people have true connections to what Lovecraft has written and their own lenses through which to view it #that are unique and individual #it's given us a fascinating crop of genre writers #but more to the point it's given us privately valuable themes and stories
fearful people often end up bigoted because it’s very hard, when you’re very scared, to interrogate whether or not anything you’re told is a threat is in fact actually that bad. you’re already scared. people who tell you how to navigate a frightening world full of obscure and complex dangers become trusted very quickly, because it’s such a relief to hear someone validate your own anxiety. you see people get very bigoted, very fast, when they get sucked into cults, scams, and populist movements, all of which meet in the middle, and all of which use fear to control their victims.
lovecraft was notably racist even for the time he was in. his contemporaries remark on it. but look at q-anons and terfs and antis and neo-nazis today. it’s not about education, stupidity, hatred, lack of opportunity to know any better, mental illness-- it’s just fear. fear is at the heart of everything they do, the kind of fear that makes you stupid, and violent, and insular. the kind of fear that makes you see monsters everywhere. lovecraft wasn’t afraid because he was racist. he was racist because he was afraid.
and stories about fear, about what we’re afraid of, and why, and if the fear is worse than what we’re afraid of, or if there really is something out there that’s coming to get us, and how that fear makes us stupid more often than it makes us smart, and what we do to each other out of fear, the lengths we go to, the ways we lose our humanity or deny it of others.... of course that’s good horror. that’s what horror IS.
Though I will strongly argue that his stories ARE also about mental illness and about being made other and monstrous by it, but also about surviving it.
Like the way that he's racist as shit do not get me wrong, Lovecraft is ablist as shit. The Music of Erich Zahn is this wonderful weird stew, right: it's this mess of lateral violence and connection, of the narrator being a patronizing ablist little shit to this mute violinist but also because of their shared mental illness (which he discusses explicitly, albeit in period-normal language as "nervous" disorders or "temperament" or whatever) or what he assumes is; the looming spectre of any Lovecraft story is "madness", this undifferentiated mass of "losing your mind", and it's both fundamentally, throughout the mythos, ablist as shit and also so clearly coming From The Inside, from this fear and this awareness and this experience.
The internalised ablist self-loathing in, eg, The Statement of Randolph is amazing; the way in which that underpins and fundamentally structures his relationship with Harley Warren and with how things unfold. And I think that is another element, as well: his narrators are often weak, often deeply fucked up, afraid, they freeze, they panic, they make stupid choices, they go crazy.
One of my things as a mentally ill person is that I need the word "crazy"* because I need something to describe the times (universally negative) when the inside of my head is a sharp-edged pit of knives divorced from reality that is not touched by "irrational" or whatever the fuck softer, kinder, more appropriate word you can come up with. And Lovecraft also captures that. He captures living with that, struggling with that; he also captures watching someone you love struggle with it (and succumb to it) in astonishingly accurate form, especially for what people did, in fact, deal with in terms of "treatment" from his era.
And he captures coming out the other side of it: of the shaky sense that you're PRETTY sure you're in touch with things as they actually are now, that you're, well, sane, but the now-forever-present awareness that that can happen, that you can end up where you were, that it's always there to go back to if something goes wrong.
I absolutely don't think we should lionize him; I 100% backed, for example, the change for the World Fantasy Award to something other than his head. He was a racist ablist and several other ists trashfire and I see zero need to ignore or make that palatable.
You don't HAVE TO, in order to engage with his work, and especially don't have to in order to use it as a place to start - to dig, and to make something else out of it. There's shit in there, so shove it somewhere to decompose at whatever degrees centigrade it is that sanitizes things and use it to fertilize new roses. But there is stuff in there that touches those feelings of alienation and fear and aloneness and taintedness better than almost anyone, and I don't have to think he was a role model to know that.
{*nb: not interested in a debate about this at this time; you are absolutely welcome to have your own relationship with this word, in your space. This is mine, in mine. Thank you.}
adhd is crazy cuz its called "cant pay attention disorder" and then it can completely ruin ur life and make u nonfunctional and people irl assume it's the 5 year old boy disorder and people online assume it's the annoying 15 year old disorder meanwhile the dea thinks you want to do substances for fun so they wont let anyone produce more of the medication that keeps ur life somewhat intact
