today's warm up: The woods are dark and deep, and damn does Mae need some sleep. (I've been playing nitw, love it so much but man it hurts!)
taylor price

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
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JBB: An Artblog!
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"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
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izzy's playlists!
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@bluenotemagpie
today's warm up: The woods are dark and deep, and damn does Mae need some sleep. (I've been playing nitw, love it so much but man it hurts!)
Thesis statement: The popularity of "found family" is a great thing, especially as it celebrates the importance of non-biological, non-romantic relationships. However, an overemphasis on this relationship model can lead us to undervaluing philia in favor of storge, in much the same way that an overemphasis on shipping can lead to undervaluing philia in favor of eros. It can also lead to an erasure of the differences between philia and storge, treating these two types of love as interchangeable instead of celebrating the distinctive aspects of each.
...Yeah, this could definitely be an Entire Literal Essay, actually. This is...not the short version, but it is the shortest I can manage.
So my main thought is that Friendship is the hardest form of love for our culture to see as distinct and important in its own right, and “found family” often (though not always) ends up as a sort of...middle ground between that point and the “Only Romance Is Important” idea. In a ship-dominated culture, Friendship is often reduced to Level 1 Romance, and—at least in some ways—a found-family-dominated fandom culture can end up reducing Friendship to Level 1 Family.
In practice, I think that....even when we know that we don’t see or want to see an important relationship as Romantic, a lot of us still struggle with the idea of Friendship by itself being equally valuable or important. So we equate “familial” with “important” (because family is undeniably as important as romance, right? Or at least it’s a lot easier to make that case—and also, there is the not-at-all-insignificant benefit that it marks your view of a relationship as CLEARLY platonic!), and then we try to fit every relationship we love into a clearly-labeled Family-Shaped Box, in order to affirm its importance and give it legitimacy that “just friendship” might not.
...which is, ironically, what shippers are sometimes doing when they seem to be putting every relationship they love into a Romance-Shaped Box for the same reason. That’s the highest-status box there is! Don’t you think this relationship deserves the highest Relationship Rank??
But Friendship—philia, using the Greek word (or at least using it as C. S. Lewis uses it—isn’t a weaker form or “first stage” of other loves. It’s its own form of love. Not lesser, but different. And if we keep following our instinct to “legitimize” it by conflating it with family/storge, we end up doing both kinds of love a disservice.
(And I am definitely including myself in the group of people with this instinct! There’s a fandom I’ve gotten into recently that—as not infrequently happens—has a central relationship you could easily consider “father-son,” “best friends,” or a mixture of the two, and there’s variance within the fandom. I personally view this relationship pretty much purely as “best friends” in my own interpretation, but...a few years ago, I would have been much closer to the “father-son” camp. And even though I’ve consciously changed my approach to character relationships over those last few years—mainly due to a variety of other fandom exposures over the past few years, and the pro-friendship opinions I‘ve formulated while thinking about them—I still have some of those pro-familial instincts I entered fandom with! They’re very much what I came here with, and even though I now like other approaches better, they’re still in my brain.)
The disservice to philia comes in the fact that we are still not celebrating it as a non-romantic, non-familial form of love in its own right—which stinks, because it’s great!! and important to humans!! and we should all appreciate how wonderful Friendship is without feeling like we have to turn it onto another kind of relationship once it passes some Importance Threshold. It’s also a less-important disservice to specific fictional relationships that we try to fit into a Family Box and maybe end up misrepresenting or oversimplifying in the process.
The disservice to storge comes in the fact that, with the label of “Family” so highly valued in itself, it tends to get overused and slapped on everything until it’s started to lose all distinctively familial meaning. It becomes harder for us to explore the depths and beauties of distinctively familial love when we’ve lost the verbal distinction between “relationships founded upon specifically familial roles, a strong shared background, and/or an unchosen yet unbreakable connection” (which is how I would identify storge relationships just off the top of my head) and the “found family” definition of “any group of people who love each other not-exclusively-romantically and aren’t related.”
Personally, I kinda miss alternative labels like TVTropes’ “True Companions” or “Platonic Life Partners.” Characters don’t need to be spouses or siblings to be important to each other. They can be solely and purely—though not “just!”—friends.
Hello!
I've entered the final phase of my graduate degree program in Folklore and Ethnology. My coursework and fieldwork/data collection complete, I am now in the process of writing my thesis during this summer trimester.
As planned, the support so many of you so generously provided, in addition to an education stipend I earned through environmental work, enabled me to enroll in and attend courses in my program, afford housing, and generally live everyday as a student for the duration of my course modules.
The funds lasted exactly as long as planned (literally to the day, I couldn't believe it lol!), and I could not be more grateful for every cent and word of support I received over this last year and a half.
In the final leg of my program, I must ask for support of one final need: There are quite a few books I need which I cannot access through my university, from friends and classmates, my professors, online archives & epublications, or any other means. Some are difficult to find in the first place to be able to purchase at all.
Put simply: I need some help buying books!
Many of them have Ebook editions for as little as €15,00! Others I have to actually email the authors and ask for personal PDFs, but they still aren't too expensive.
I began a new job recently and am on my way, but I won't have the couple hundred euro it will ultimately cost to purchase all of these books this month in order to have them while I work on my thesis.
If anyone has a few bucks to throw at me, I'd be very grateful for the support! Thank you, so much, for all you've already done! MY KOFI: https://ko-fi.com/slorglvr1000
u can just do whatever at any age all of the time nobody cares except teenagers
teenager will be like ur 40 with a hobby ? 💀 that’s sad <- nobody else thinks this way though they are just going through some stuff
Even teenagers mostly don't give a shit tbh. My teens therapy patients sometimes roast me for being on tumblr or having an Android or being a stereotypical Milennial, etc. but there's very little sincere animosity behind it in my experience. Some of them actively find it cool that I play DnD. The most important thing about being cool to teens is that they can smell fear, so if you are at all worried about whether they think you're cool, they won't think you're cool. I had a teen once tell me "you dress like a librarian" and I went "thank you :-) I love my local public library :-)" and they sort of shook their head in mild disgust that their sick burn had been wasted on me, but they absolutely respected me more for it. "Blissful indifference to whether you think I'm cringe" is what you need to project when interacting with the Young.
The Black Sun, Bill Mayer, 2017
Gouache, with gold leaf, on watercolor paper
Took me years to understand that boredom is not the enemy of writing. It is the raw material. Every good idea i have ever had arrived during a walk with no podcast, a train with no phone, a shower where i just stood there. The moment i fill every silence with content i stop generating anything of my own. I am just processing other people's thoughts instead of having mine. The empty space is where the work comes from. Protecting the empty space is the actual job.
Art by northernblots
Oh noooooooo! The mystery is solved! You’ve solved my final riddle, you are ze new riddle master... Congratulations… You have proven yourselves... quite the adventurers... oh, I’ve landed on Bryan- Bryan, ahhh… Bryan, I’m so proud of zem… I’m going to die now... My life is flagging from my body... I’ll see my family... goodbye cruel worrrrld-
I literally have no context for this and it’s fucking me up.
I don’t know how but this post is funnier in night mode
arts degrees r so funny because you go in class and theyre like What Is A Poem? we dont know for sure... and then moral of the story is we don't know what a poem is. and then the worst part of it is that theyre right
free my girl she did all that and that’s what makes her such a compellingly complex character. that’s her essence
“Do it scared” “do it alone” are all great tips, but my biggest takeaway from therapy is do it messy. This is especially true if you’re getting out of a burnout, which I experience often. Literally just do it messy. You don’t need to pick the perfect trail to walk, the perfect playlist to listen to, whatever the fuck it is. You don’t need to have a meticulous to do list and wake up at the exact time you planned and drink the exact amount of water you planned to drink. Like the biggest thing for people like me to remember is sometimes it’s okay to do it messy. Put on a random yt workout and just get it done in sweats. Do 5 minutes of a daunting task and go from there. Sometimes just getting up is a win during intense burnouts or depressive funks. Literally just do it messy.
Scissor-tailed Flycatcher (Tyrannus forficatus), male, family Tyrannidae, order Passeriformes, East TX, USA
photographs by Ken Edwards
💥Poshanka! Edges sharp and senses keen!
Happy pride to those 5 seconds where Charlie Swan thought Jacob was coming out to him in the most insane way possible
HJ Wingstreet they could never make me hate you.
I hate that when you’re stressed enough your body just starts falling apart. I think it should realize you’re already stressed and don’t need that and start functioning better actually