Mike Driver
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
AnasAbdin
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
d e v o n
Discoholic 🪩
Show & Tell
JVL
Keni
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
★
Janaina Medeiros
Xuebing Du
i don't do bad sauce passes
ojovivo
No title available
blake kathryn
No title available
we're not kids anymore.
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@elstrange
My son was diagnosed with leukemia just before Thanksgiving (American). It sucks. A lot. But. Ever since then, I've had this non-sexual fantasy of Aziraphale coming to my apartment and making me tea. I have so many varieties of tea, and I know he would know exactly which one to make me. And I would just curl up on the coach with a blanket and drink my tea and for 5 minutes I would be able to be vulnerable and not just holding it together for the people around me.
being 25 is like: im dying. im living my best life. im a failure. my life hasnt started. everything interesting has already happened to me. im achieving my dreams. im cutting my hair with kitchen scissors. im starting a skincare routine. im a corporate professional. im a sellout. im out of groceries. i have too many groceries. i am never going to be successful. i am going to win a hugo award before im 30. im crazy. im boring. i need to finish this essay. i need to finish this story. i need to start a newsletter. i need to start tweeting more. i need to stop tweeting. i need to ghost all my friends. i need to tell my friends i love them. i need to find a new apartment. i need to take out the trash. i am the trash that needs to be taken out.
Maybe someone will hear this, and enjoy their twenties in a way I couldn’t. I’m 48 now, and my life is honestly just beginning. It’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve felt like I have anything figured out, and I – and every other adult – is really just kind of faking it most of the time. Because we were told, over and over again, “grow up and be responsible” so we made the destination the point, and missed a lot of the joy of the journey. Yes. “Growing up” is a thing we all need to do, and we all eventually do. But when you’re in your 20s? Live your life! Enjoy your life! You’re going to make a million mistakes. You’re going to fall down a thousand times. That’s part of being in your 20s, and it’s really okay. You are not the trash that needs to be taken out. You aren’t trash at all. You’re a person and you deserve to be happy and to follow your dreams (and not everyone in their 20s knows what their dreams even are!). But the most important thing I want to share, the thing I know at least one of you needs to hear, that I hope you can hear and really act upon, is this: Don’t give yourself “my 30th birthday” as a deadline to have it all figured out and happening. When you do that, as I did, you completely lose the fun and the joy and the freedom that is such an essential part of your twenties. All these questions you have, all this turmoil you feel, all the stress about not being further along your career path … all of that is totally normal. All of your peers are experiencing it. Everyone who was in their 20s before you has experienced that. You’re going to be okay. Keep asking the questions, and keep challenging your presumptions. You’ve been told the world is one particular way, by your parents and educators, and now that you’re in your twenties, you get to find out what was true. Figuring all that out takes a lot of time and a lot of energy. You can do it. I feel everything the OP posted here, in my memories of being 25, and I want the OP to know that I felt all of those things, too. They’re part of life’s journey, and you are not trash for experiencing all of them.
me at 25: if i don’t become one of the big famous prolific fantasy authors my life will have been wasted!
me at 48: i made my son feel loved today. i have accomplished what is important.
the priorities you’re given growing up are often just adults fantasizing through you about the things they wish they could’ve done. it’s not your job as a human being to impress them or fulfill their dreams. your job as a human is to be a member of your community and make the world a little better, that’s all.
hi! its me! op! i did not expect my “semi-self deprecating oh jeez everything happens all the time, i swear i’m not mostly a sadboi, this was actually a very out of character post” post to get 60k+ notes. that was very weird to begin with.
i also did not expect wil wheaton to reblog with life advice and to tell me that i’m not the trash that needs to be taken out (thanks wil wheaton) and i hope that all the other 20somethings who have been reblogging this and tagging it with very depressing tags get some reassurance. there have been a lot of depressing tags. it has maybe been harshing my mood, as the kids say (the kids do not say this)
i also did not expect jumpingjacktrash, whose homestuck fanfic i read a lot of when i was sixteen, to reblog this with life advice either. tumblr really is one of the sites to ever exist.
anyway im reblogging this with all the commentary because you know what, i made the original post, im feeling vaguely obligated to spread some positivity.
PSA: AO3 HAS BEEN INFECTED WITH AI BOT COMMENTS.
Have you seen one of these dipshits? If you post regularly on ao3, chances are YES, but more likely you didn't notice nor suspect it was a bot. Sometimes they start off nice, or even praise you before getting nasty out of nowhere, like so:
But much like Grok, their newest obsession is nazism.
I don't know where they come from, or what purpose this could possibly serve other than suicidebaiting random people in the internet, I guess; but apparently they've started parroting names from real users to send these comments and shifting their general length to go by undetected. Maybe those are scrappers trying to train 'reviewbots' to be sold as part of some scam service promising to give feedback for newbie writers, who the fuck knows.
Here are more examples of the tone and backhanded compliments you can find in these:
If you regularly post on AO3 or interact with writers in it, please pass this along so they don't feel insane receiving bombs in their inbox. This is ridiculous.
if you wiped every ICE agent off the face of the earth, a hundred million people would become safer overnight. if you wiped every furry off the face of the earth, the entire internet would collapse for good in a matter of hours. i know where my allegiances lie.
take one and pass it on
a hug
a beer
a snack
a good night's sleep
If you voted, please don't scroll without sharing this post! Mosab is raising funds for his wife and three daughters to escape Gaza before it is too late.
Over 65% of the goal is unmet, even after months of trying. Mosab and his family count on these donations to afford food and stay alive.
Lama, one of the 4 year old twins, is sick and in pain. She needs to be treated but the family cannot even afford basic food. Even the smallest support can be the difference between life and death.
Please help my friend out by sharing and donating.
My name is Musab Hamouda, and my wife is Aya Abu Al-Qambaz. W… Mosab Hammouda needs your support for "Help Us Start a New Life After Our Hom
Vetted by GazaVetters #520 and shared by @/90-ghost.
My daughter is in serious danger and her life is at risk Please help me and share this post you might be the reason to save her before it’s too late.
Are your eyes brown?
Yes
No
They say brown eyes carry the warmth of the earth…
I’m Zeina, and my eyes are brown. But behind that warmth lies a war that never stops, and a hunger that shows no mercy. We live in Gaza — surrounded by suffering, starvation, and relentless bombing, day and night. Each day grows harsher than the one before, and with every sunrise, we fight just to survive.
If my words have reached you, please… spare a moment of your time. 📌 The link for support is in my bio. Even a simple share can make a world of difference. 🕊️
My Campaign Vetted By @gazavetters at #213
Please guys I need your help, so close to reach first goal just left €484, please donate
Please donate whatever you can to help my kids
You can do something is good today, donate now
Please donate!!! Help this family however you can!!!
“Does the world expect us to be well-behaved victims while we are getting killed? For us to be slaughtered without making a noise? We decided to defend our people with whatever weapons we had.”
— Yahya Sinwar
Five years since the police murder of George Floyd rocked the world. The billionaires and their politicians were shaken by the popular uprising that followed, and now they are trying to exact revenge. But the struggle continues. We won't give up. #BlackLivesMatter
This post is almost 4 years old.
MAGA racism is killing us.
First Felon is kidnapping and trafficking.
#LanguageMatters ✨️racism✨️💫
Thank you to all the mothers for everything you do. You deserve so much more.
i think a 7 year old girl could kill any transphobe. imagine telling a 7 year old girl she's not as strong as the boys around her because she's a girl, she'd rip your organs out in less than a second. have you ever seen what happens when a teacher says "i need a strong boy to carry this thing"?? have you never seen a small child carry four times her body weight with a smile on her face just to spite someone???? i think kids should be allowed to kill tbh
KIDS SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF ADULTS TRYING TO FORCE SEXIST STEREOTYPES ONTO THEM WHAT PART OF THAT DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND
What the FUCK. What the FUCK.
so, let's talk about this. because it's not quite true
Barbie was not the only fashion doll on the market (much less the only one to ever exist, a worrying claim from the first Barbie movie trailer). Dolls like Madame Alexander's Cissy, Ideal's Miss Revlon, and Uneeda's Dollikin were all available before Barbie's 1959 release
While Mattel would love for you to believe that Barbie was the first, Cissy- released in 1955 -would like a word.
Ruth Handler might well have SAID that she "noticed the only dolls on the market were babies," but she and her husband ran an existing toy company; Barbie was not Mattel's first project. She 100% would have been aware of the other fashion dolls available. In short: if she said that, she was...almost certainly stretching the truth.
There was indeed pushback against fashion dolls from cultural commentators who thought little girls should only play with baby dolls, to encourage Maternal Instincts(TM)...but that dates at least back to the French fashion dolls of the 1860s-1890s, which were accused of making little girls "worldly" in magazines of the day. It wasn't a new idea developed especially in response to Barbie.
What set Barbie apart from other fashion dolls was twofold:
She was smaller and cheaper. Cissy retailed for like $13 in just her lingerie, which was quite pricey for a doll at the time (Barbie cost $3 originally), and stood 20" tall. Miss Revlon was similarly large and unwieldy for a child to carry around. As I understand it, Handler noticed her daughter's fondness for movie star paper dolls and sought to create a 3-dimensional version.
She had an adult face. As you can see above, Cissy may have had breasts, but she was also quite baby-faced. Barbie, with her arched brows and narrow cheeks, looked more like an adult woman in her facial proportions.
Still unusual! Just not unique
But I'm not really here to split hairs about which was the actual first 1950s fashion doll. My main thesis is this: Barbie was NOT originally meant to be empowering.
...or disempowering. Or anything but a fashion doll for which a businesswoman trying to make money felt there was a niche.
Yes, she had a career at the beginning- as a fashion model. Hardly a job many men were trying to keep women out of. The first non-modeling careers she had were ballerina, flight attendant, and registered nurse, female-dominated fields that nobody was challenging women's right to pursue.
(Original Barbie box. If you can't read the text, it says "Barbie(T.M.) Teen Age Fashion Model.")
That's not to say that Handler was completely without deeper thoughts on Barbie's place in the world. She was adamant that, while Barbie might model a bridal gown, she would never actually marry Ken to prevent her from being tied down as a wife and mother. And certainly later in her life, she got onboard with the "girls can do anything!" messaging of later Barbie generations.
But to say that Barbie was intended to be #empowering or make a statement from the beginning is just revisionist history that's bound to leave people disappointed. I mean, what's Twitter OP going to think when they discover that an early Barbie babysitting set came with a little book called "How to Lose Weight" that simply said "Don't eat!" on the back? Handler was still president of the company at the time- how does that fit with this starry-eyed vision of her creating an empowering doll for little girls?
Putting Barbie on a pedestal is going to lead to just as rude an awakening as casting her in the "worthless bimbo doll" role.
i’d also like to chime in with some cynicism about the mythologized state of american women’s empowerment in the late 50s. women knew they could do men’s jobs because they had done them during the war. fifteen years previously women had built ships and airplanes! they’d flown cargo planes and drove trucks and worked in mines and and worked farms and fought fires and kept things running while men went off and killed themselves. then the surviving men came back and demanded, as their due, that all the women get back to the kitchen. and some women agreed and some women disagreed and were violently persuaded to agree. and that was the 50s.
women were very much removed, wholesale, by force, from the workplaces they had capably run. they were allowed to substitute for men in a pinch, but never ever compete with them. and the men who enforced this relegation knew very well that women could do men’s jobs, because they had just done them. it was imperative after that to make sure what had just happened was seen as a tragic aberration of the natural order, and best forgotten.
so like. women in the 60′s weren’t inventing women’s empowerment from a state of childish innocence. the older you get the more you realize fifteen, twenty years isn’t all that long. things can change, fast, and for the worse. these girls with their air hostess barbies, their aunts might have been pilots.
every step forward, women clawed back from men by force. feminism wasn’t invented out of a naive ignorance of any alternatives, where women suddenly suggest a bold new idea that just occurred to them and then men realize what big sillies they all were. women can do anything that men can do, and they always have. the fight is over whether or not they get to.
these girls with their air hostess barbies, their aunts might have been pilots
Worth reblogging the whole thing just for that gut-punch line. I knew this on some level, but never really thought about the implied family dynamics.
