when you’re a goth bitch but you still want attention and are still clingy:

I actually love hearing about reformed people's stories. I love hearing about people who were in toxic communities or people who used to objectively be dickheads talking about how they got out of that. How they made themselves better.

I hate how most people's initial reaction to stories like that are things like:

"How could you have ever done those things?!" "Oh my god, you believed those things?!" "Well it doesn't un-do the harm you did!"

People incessantly advocate for change but then refuse to allow people who have changed the grace of being acknowledged and given opportunities and chances.

I love hearing about ex-antis talking about how they don't spend their days being angry and sending death threats anymore.

I love hearing about ex-homophobes who realized there's no magic law about what is "natural."

I love reformed bullies talking about how they made amends with their victims and spend their days being considerate of others.

You can't scream about wanting people to change but then expect them to spend the rest of their lives stuck in the past and on who they used to be. You can't expect people to spend the entire rest of their lives grovelling and apologizing and demeaning themselves.

Instead of clinging to who they were, latch onto who they are.

Ask how they got out of it. Commend them on changing. Enjoy that there's one less cause of harm in the world.

I also love stuff like that because it's a blueprint for how we can save others. If someone used to be a giant racist and stopped, we can take what convinced them to change and spread that message

The first step to change is to forgive yourself and recognise that you can be different, but that'll get you very little if people refuse to forgive you and allow you to be different.

this this this is what I'm always on about as an ex-fundie

born good lefties fear reformed assholes because the reformed asshole had to introspect and choose to change.

they put more effort into becoming good while the born good leftist just kinda always was raised to be.

reformed asshole chooses thoughtfulness and examines their morals while born good leftists are more dogmatic.

we are products of our environment until we aren't according to the morally lucky.

check out Haruomi Hosono’s “Watering a Flower.” if you get the chance. Sound of the summer

rave reviews

I know it's no longer a novel observation how the entire internet is enshittified now but it's still shocking that so many of the things we depend on had such a sudden and marked decline in quality.

Google results are mostly ads. Facebook is 90% ads, 10% domestic terrorists. Twitter is... well, not Twitter and it's only good for Nazis to yell at each other in the hopes they make .0004 cents per tweet. Instagram is ads. TikTok is misinformation central. YouTube serves forty-seven ads per second of videos watched.

Every news article is behind a paywall, and some of them are just AI-text garbled from someone else's much better article, also behind a paywall.

AI art has made it impossible to find images you want. It's also exploded the use and potential use of misinformation. Your data is now being fed to generative AIs to make cheap slop that only makes information harder to find and source.

Everyone wants you using their app instead of a web browser so that you aren't allowed to block the 3,487 ads per page that have to load.

Amazon is full of fake or low-quality dupes of the things you actually want to buy. Netflix and other streaming services are raising prices, cutting available shows, and erasing the existence of shows in order to avoid paying writers. Art hosting sites such as DeviantArt allow your work to be scraped for NFTs and generative AI without your consent or any form of compensation. Spotify has demonetized over 80% of their tracks and pays the rest astoudingly low, worse than the other streaming services which also underpay.

Everything is a subscription service which means not only are you paying for the same product in perpetuity but you never technically own any tool you use and your right to use it can be revoked at any time. Everything has to be a "smart" product so when the business inevitably folds and/or the servers shut down, your product no longer works. Hope it's not something you need!

Every company no longer accepts phone calls but routes you through a series of automated messages until finally dumping you off to an overworked and underpaid person who has no power to help you. Speaking of phones, you can't use them for calls. There are so many robocallers and scams that no one in their right mind picks up the phone anymore. Texts are going the same way. No one wants to dig through 100 scam messages to find the one from the person they actually want to talk to.

It's all just the inevitable end result of capitalism. It doesn't have to be this way. But there needs to be regulation, and fast, or the "Dead Internet Theory" will no longer be a fringe theory.

Do conservatives experience love? Like, even for their own children ever? Or do they think they do when really they just find them useful as a resource and they think that's what love is? I've grown up kmowing several and I've never seen them show love. They just talk about it a lot. Maybe the bodies of these human shaped objects just reflexively mimic what they think emotions look like?? 🤔

Yes, I know we're all told that "dehumanizing" is harmful either because it's just morally wrong to sink to that level or it will dangerously trick you into forgetting that the bad guys are people not that far removed from yourself. However I am not dumb enough to forget what a human literally is and more importantly I want to say mean and cruel things about people who think most of my friends an family should just die. Like, Ben Shapiro has a wife and four children, but if he loved them, then he'd still love them and accept them if they turned out gay or transgender or anything else he "disagrees" with. Instead, as far as I'm aware, he'd disown them if that happened, like Elon Musk already did, who is also not a person. These are things or perhaps phenomena that may have arms and legs and may make recognizable words out of their holes but they clearly don't experience real love and their personhood doesn't deserve any more of my respect than an imaginary character. If the Shapiro's whole family got run over by a truck tomorrow for example the thing might make weird noises that might remind you of someone being sad about loss but if you've heard the other noises that it makes then you know there's nothing resembling a person with emotions under its pasty meat.

This still blows my mind

I will happily delete this if I’m derailing or taking away from the original message (initially I put this in the tags, but a friend asked me to reblog as text)

If you don't want to pursue an autism or adhd diagnosis and you have access to a doctor or therapist you can get them to write you a note attesting to a symptom of your neurodivergence (rather than naming the condition itself) and stating the need for accommodation. 

It's something my therapist told me about when we were still working in offices. I have sensory processing issues and on multiple occasions the noise in my office was so bad I broke the skin on my hand clenching my fist. 

This work-around of course won't fix structural ableism and relies on you having access to a doctor/therapist who actually gives a crap, so still might only help a couple of folks. 

Thats a good add on

It kills me when a female character is overly sexualized and people try to “fix” her design by reducing her chest size.

Excuse me, the fat tits weren’t the problem here!

i dont even see a problem with the sexualization in the first place. never have.

tired of this being a bitter pill to swallow with progressive spaces. Like i was supposed to look at the blatant encroachment of puritanism and consider it anything other than what it is.

Anti-Burzum / Varg posters & propaganda after Øystein's death.

almost like killing someone is bad and affects people or something. im surprised it took me so long so find this kind of pushback against varg.

how it feels to be online these days

Gouache Pleinair Paintings I made in Greece, 2019. Incredible country. I went back this year but didn’t have time to paint. Next time!

These are from Athens , Meteora and Milos

This is because snow doesn't bounce sound waves like concrete does. When the world is like this it's LITERALLY quieter. The snow muffles sound

There are plenty of reasons not to use twitter any more but for artists, handing over the rights to twitter to train AI with it should be the final straw. So here is another solution.

Also, tools like glaze which poison images against AI are really helpful but they take a long time to process each image so consider just doing a cropped section of the image if you want to share it to twitter.

I made s quick version for those who don't use Blue sky but Tumblr

An one for personal use:

album covers 𖤐