Assorted Puzzle Pieces

29 💙 Nerd 💚 Mom 💙 She/Her 💚 Queer 🌈 Proship 🌈 Multifandom 💙 Fanfic Junkie & Proud Heller 💚 🎤Loud about the important things @assortedpuzlpcs on Twitter

[redstonedust]

the whole "insulting someone based on their appearance is bad because it could indirectly hurt people you like who share that feature" is a good start for unlearning body shaming but i do think we need to go further and remind people that even if there was some physical trait that was magically 10000% exclusive to conservatives and creeps and nobody else ever had it, we still shouldnt be insulting them based on that. because the problem with them is not their appearance its their ideology and actions. by insulting their appearance you arent just indirectly insulting others who look like that, youre literally not making the correct point. stay on topic ya know.

[kuttithevangu]

Being a calm, gentle, non-reactive person is really hard work, which is probably why many people are none of these things. Personally I think it’s worth it but sometimes one does want to just roll around on the floor wailing at the top of one’s lungs

[kuttithevangu]

People in my notes who think I’m repressed or dissociating: you will feel better when you learn emotions are not a binary of Not Feeling It vs Being Overwhelmed By It

[blorbospinninhouseplant]

Ok but How Do I Do That

[kuttithevangu]

Self-regulation for adults: Strategies for getting a handle on emotions and behavior - Harvard Health

Learn strategies for enhancing self-regulation skills, and discover the benefits of mastering this essential life skill to help emotional dy

There are many techniques (also, there are drugs)

[blorbospinninhouseplant]

Thank you, but do you have any advice for teens?

[kuttithevangu]

So my FIRST piece of information if you’re still a teen is that genuinely as you get older it will get easier to regulate your emotions. During adolescence our brains are undergoing a lot of growth and change that genuinely does make it harder to do this, on a scientific level. However, practicing emotional regulation skills can still help a lot and if you can find something that works it will make life easier going forward

This page has more information and recommendations for some basic exercises:

Emotional Regulation for Teens: Strategies to Manage Intense Feelings

Discover effective strategies for teens to manage intense emotions, develop emotional awareness, and improve overall well-being. Expert tips

[teaboot]

I hate you Ozempic craze I hate you 'heroin chic' I hate you weight loss ads on public radio I hate Burn Fat Fast ads every thirty seconds I hate you I hate you I hate you

[teaboot]

I grew up before the term 'thigh gap' was invented I grew up before 'hip dip' was invented I was born before 'muffin top' was a thing before 'clean girl look' was a thing before 'glass skin' was a thing before razoring off peach fuzz was a thing and I'm so so so fucking tired of us inventing new concepts purely for the purpose of convincing people to hate their own bodies enough to buy products

[teaboot]

Last time Tuberculosis ran through the USA a small number of people got it on purpose to look skinny and waifish and delicate and used makeup to look flushed and bony and when the Victorians figured out tapeworms people would infect themselves on purpose to starve themselves smaller and women and now in the year of our lord 2026 there is a noticeable fraction of the USAmerican population genuinely thrilled about a treatment-resistant microbial parasite that makes you shit and vomit your brains out for a month because side effects include weight loss and STILL we talk about being skinny like it's the natural default setting for all healthy people as if it's a self-sustaining standard and not an imaginary goal that we are constantly constantly constantly beating ourselves with a whip to acheive

[lakemojave]

People are unfazed if you hate women but if you dislike dogs they assume you're a bad person

[lakemojave]

Tumblr users will read a post complaining about normalized misogyny and hyperfocus on your claim that it's ok to dislike dogs

[anonajn]

relentlessly funny to me when people treat a relationship between someone in their 30s and someone in their 40s as "age difference". bro i cannot tell you which of my friends are 34 and which are 44. i can probably tell you which ones aren't 30 yet, but it's probable some of them are 50 now and i didn't notice. if you're over 30 and don't have kids, it's kinda all one age until you can collect social security.

[delicatebarbarianchildren]

Thinking about their first year on Centaur, how everyone is excited because the Cup is ours baby!!!! and they get to play with THE Shane Hollander. They expect to witness absolute magic on ice: Hollander and Rozanov, not rivals, but on the same team - no one can stop them.

And then, they get to the first practice, and Ilya and Shane are already there, and they're firing pucks like rockets, and they're skating the rink as if they're being chased and they're checking each other as if the other one insulted his mother. The whole team is both scared and apprehensive: they're pretty sure they saw Ilya and Shane get married. Did they have a fight? Is Shane angry at Ilya because he's captain instead of him? Why is Roz checking Hollander in the boards like he wants to break him in half? After several practices they finally ask them what the deal is: Shane is all serios, if we want a chance at the Cup, we have to be on top of our game. While Roz smiles dreamily at Shane, nodding and saying plus it gets my husband vey hot when he sees how good at hockey I am.

[loreleywrites]

you solve the mystery of what to have for dinner one night and you think "hell yeah case closed forever" WRONG there is a dinner mystery the next night too

[mawofthemagnetar]

The problem with being low support needs is that people mentally autocorrect that to “no support needs” and then proceed to give you absolutely nothing and then get surprised when you implode after six months.

[gurlsrool]

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of people say that Shane and Ilya were stupid for not just randomly clarifying one day that the rivalry was never real and they’ve been friends all along. I think people are forgetting or maybe not realizing how much autonomy they’ve lost playing for the NHL

The trade off of getting to play for the NHL is giving up their bodies, names, and likenesses. Their whole identities are used as a marketing tool and that’s part of their job. People are making a lot of money off of their rivalry. The NHL is getting more ticket and jersey sales from it. Fans are placing bets on their games. It really is that serious and people really are that invested.

That’s why the Irina Foundation plan is so smart. The rivalry is a narrative people are buying into, so Shane’s suggesting a new narrative. It gives the league a new marketing angle and it generates enough positive PR that people are kinda backed into a corner of letting the rivalry go. No one wants to be the guy saying a sports rivalry is more important than charity, kids, and mental health.

So no, Shane and Ilya are not stupid for feeling trapped by the stakes of this rivalry. They are trapped. They’re trapped in that tricky dissonance between the Hollander and Rozanov the media, league, and fans expect them to be and the Shane and Ilya they really are.

When Shane wakes Ilya up in the middle of the night with his plan, he’s saying: who we really are matters. What we have matters. I’m tired of giving up happiness to contort myself into the shape of who Shane Hollander is supposed to be. The real me wants you and chooses you and this is how we can make it happen.

It’s not just an I love you. It’s a “here’s how I can love you”. It’s a “I’ve given everything to the league and now I want this for myself and this is how we can have it. This is how we can finally become an ‘us’.” That to me is a lot more meaningful than any casual declaration of friendship would be.

[raincitygirl76]

If it was easy for them to be in contact, Rookie Ilya could’ve just emailed someone at the league and asked them for Shane’s email address. Then emailed Shane and gotten his phone number that way.

Ilya is ESL but he’s definitely not stupid. If getting Shane’s contact information through the league or through their respective teams was possible, that would’ve been much less risky than giving Shane his room number at All Stars while Shane is sitting next to Scott Hunter. Whom Ilya has no reason to believe isn’t both straight and homophobic.

I have to assume that teenage Ilya did try to get contact information for Shane via a less risky route. And he was probably told to fuck off. There’s no good reason for you to email the other rookie that the league and your teams have decided is your sworn enemy. Bad for the rivalry marketing if it turns out the rivals have each other’s email addresses and maybe phone numbers. And are amiably sending each other memes.

And teenage Ilya couldn’t keep pushing for Shane’s email address when a bunch of adults were telling him he didn’t need it. Risky that they’d think it was weird of him to keep wanting to talk to Shane. Start looking into Ilya (who is hiding in plain sight, and absolutely can’t afford to get sent back to Russia in disgrace).

They were both barely 18 when they got drafted, and 19 when they started playing for the league. They had a lot of talent and potential, but very little actual power at that point in their fledgling careers. Especially compared to the suits. Those men held teenage Shane and Ilya’s careers in the palms of their hands. And the suits had invested a lot of money in the rivalry narrative.

When they were 29 year old established superstars, Roger Crowell, Montreal’s coach, and the league still tried to push them around. Even though they had a good support system. Their agent knew about their relationship, Shane’s parents knew, Ilya was separated from his abusive family in Russia and already had Canadian permanent residency.

As 19 year old rookies, it would have been much easier for Crowell to push them around. Their agents and Shane’s parents didn’t know about them, Ilya’s agent would’ve been a Russian handpicked by Grigori, he would’ve been on a work visa, they didn’t have the financial cushion of ten years in the league, etc, etc.

Crowell walked into that meeting with 29 year old Shane and Ilya full of confidence that he could bully them into going along with a lie. His confidence was misplaced. But if that meeting had been with 19 year old Shane and Ilya, he would have had a whole lot more leverage.

[raincitygirl76]

Also, some great tags starting with @humsaphar

Then we have @strangers-fiction

And then @gayfertilitygoddess

After that is @assortedpuzzlepieces

Next up @winterequinoxx although I disagree that Alexei knows Ilya is queer. If he did know, he would’ve used that information to blackmail Ilya until the end of time. In the restaurant after their dad’s funeral Alexei is panicking. He knows full well there’s a good chance his rich little brother will cut off funds now. Without Ilya’s money Alexei can’t pay his coke dealer. He doesn’t seem to be high enough up in the police to be worth big bribes. If Alexei knew, he would’ve used it then, to keep the money tap turned on.

Then @honeyedheartss

And then two more sets of peer review by @fanshipper1412 and @allalrightagain

And then @jesuisnilunnilautre

After them @jewishhollanov and @sunshinereani

And finally @jakeranda

[assortedpuzzlepieces]

@raincitygirl76 literally took a post I was already so excited about & then went through the tags & made a carefully curated list of people with excellent opinions???!

I’m so in love with it. It’s like the perfect little follow list just for me. This might actually be my favorite thing anyone has tagged me on since I joined Tumblr

[raincitygirl76]

You’re most welcome! And peer reviewing your new tags as well, @assortedpuzzlepieces

Also, Shane and Ilya were both very young when they first met. Not even old enough to open a bank account without parental permission. They were doing the best they could with the information and life experience they had at the time. Which wasn’t much.

If they’d both known at 17 how things would work out, they’d probably have made different choices back then. But neither of them was psychic. Also, I think I’ve said this before, but not in this reblog chain. Shane and Ilya are millionaires. The team owners and the owners of the sports TV networks are billionaires.

The billionaires would not be happy if teenage millionaires were endangering their revenue stream because of friendship. Athletes are essentially very well-compensated itinerant labour. Who risk CTE to make their millions and whose careers will end as soon as their bodies break down.

Yuna Hollander isn’t pimping her son out to brands because she’s evil. It’s because her son plays a contact sport with a high likelihood of catastrophic injury. Shane’s career could end in one night, with one unlucky hit. So she’s raking in as much endorsement money as she can for him while he’s still young and healthy. So if his career does suddenly end, he will be well provided for in his retirement.

[tonysopranoproskater69420]

once you notice half of all memes are just a picture of a black person with unrelated text over them you really cannot unsee it

[evelynstarshine]

ok but, just the way that Captain Marvel was a film explicitly to the point of looking into the eyes of the audience about a soldier who was sent into afganistan another planet to kill the natives because she was brainwasheed by the USA Kree Empire to believe that all members of that religion species were terrorists, she discovers that they're actually the innocent victims of empire and responds by murdering the president AI government and bringing down the empire. And this was made by the MCU, at the height of it's pop culture relevance. But also, the way the USA military completely defanged it and replaced it's actual messaging in the narrative by running US Airforce recruitment ads in the cinema before each showing, causing amerikkkans to view it with that framing and forever member it solely as a pro-military film despite it's entire text.

[bfpierce]

online fandom is so fun because we’ll be talking about very serious character moments and analyzing them and stuff and there will be a lull in the discussion and someone will be like “and then they fuck about it” and then we’re all like yeah and then they fuck about it

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

I have 100,000 followers on here (i know; tumblr power user jmg) and i think it gives me, like, zero social capital? Which I think might be why it's still good.

Like, when my agents are pitching me for something, they'll be like, "Look at his facebook! Look at his tiktok!" They're never gonna say, "100,000 people follow him on tumblr. Remember tumblr?"

But the thing is, I don't actually use facebook or tiktok (except for promo). This is the only place I use, the only place where I'm interested in the community and shared creation and all that shit.

So long live tumblr. Nobody who's gonna hire me to do anything has ever heard of it. It makes for a terrible space to promote your forthcoming book tour. And that's literally why it doesn't suck.

[charl0ttan]

[doriangraysrockcollection]

i must say, i am a huge fan of when a book is in the middle of a very exciting plot containing many interesting problems when out of nowhere for a few pages it's like, "hey by the way, real quick, here's a detailed explanation of the city's water filtration system! i'm telling you this for a reason and you should worry about it. anyway! haha okay back to the plot" and you just get to be Scared for a while

[doriangraysrockcollection]

i am kissing you on the mouth right now

you are the only person who understands me. you and the person who tagged a series of unfortunate events

[malibuklaus]

[galadriel1010]

Sometimes you get a brief glimpse into the American worldview and decide that you don't want to know.

[transcyberism]

I cannot stress enough that this meme is entirely literal. there's no reference or subtext you don't know. these are simply the objectively most popular works of art from each denomination.

[quasi-normalcy]

I’m not trying to turn your kids trans; that’s stupid. I’m trying to turn them into socialists.

[quasi-normalcy]

#for real tho! their gender is their business but class struggle is everyone’s business