a gentle reminder that you just need to make things a tiny bit better for your future self. reading one page, writing one sentence, getting half of a task done, it’s still good.
wallacepolsom
Mike Driver
Sade Olutola
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH

roma★

titsay

oozey mess
NASA
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
Misplaced Lens Cap
tumblr dot com
Xuebing Du
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Jules of Nature

⁂
DEAR READER
almost home

if i look back, i am lost

izzy's playlists!
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@fudge-it-all
a gentle reminder that you just need to make things a tiny bit better for your future self. reading one page, writing one sentence, getting half of a task done, it’s still good.
This is what happens when you’re still on tumblr as an adult, you start reblogging shit like this
a 500 word short story with the same plot as your novel that explores how quickly the problem could be solved by sonic the hedgehog
knuckles gamgee
sonic heritage post
I’ve never seen this one before and it just punched me in the fucking face.
Just like Knuckles did to Sonic
seeing straight men be disgusted by booktok smut recommenders has actually radicalized me to the side of booktok smut recommenders. girls your taste may be atrocious but i will never disparage you for exposing mainstream discourse to the concept of soaking through your underwear. spent my whole life listening to men talk about penises it’s about time they get jumpscared by women talking about pussy in crude detail on social media. go forth and goon my warriors
I work at a bookstore and hearing one of my male coworkers call smutty romantasy "the downfall of society" because it's "literally just porn" radicalized me
Men have an entire industry. Entire industries dedicated to their sexualities. Let women have fantasy sex. there's not even a camera crew involved.
Left this in the notes
i’ve made this post a million times but it really does drive me up the wall when people think that the phrase “everything is political” means “everything is related to current political happenings” instead of “everything is a product of its context”
Dick and Damian at the zoo feeding giraffes
Prompt by @acetypeface via @dcforgaza
It is incredibly important to train yourself to have your first instinct be to look something up.
Don't know how to do something? Look it up.
See a piece of news mentioned on social media? Look it up.
Not sure if something is making it to the broader public consciousness, either because you don't see it much or you see people saying nobody is talking about it? Look it up.
Don't know what a word means? Look it up.
It will make you a better reader and a better writer, but it will also just make you more equipped to cope with the world.
So often, I see people talking about something as though it is the first time anyone has ever acknowledged it, when I've been reading reports about it on the news for months or years. Or I see someone totally misinterpreting an argument because they clearly don't know what a word means--or, on the other hand, making an argument that doesn't make sense because they aren't using words the right way.
Look things up! Check the news (the real news, not random people on social media)! Do your research! You (and the world) will be better for it.
today i overheard a girl say "no, f*ck that. i will be lovely to everyone. maybe some people will remember they have a heart."
ok im going to #seriouspost for a second here. I don't think Harry Potter is a manifesto. I think it was a flawed passion project that millennials latched onto because of the fantasy of sticking it to their mean teachers and arbitrarily categorizing themselves (hogwarts houses; it's the thinking millennial's astrology). I think the fact that the series got popular when and how it did was very much a product of its time.
I don't think Harry Potter is the biggest symbol of JKR's bigotry. I think the most flagrant sign of that was how she responded to critics. I watched her become radicalized in real time. I watched how she doubled down on her racism when she was called out for the ways she promoted her tragically mid fantastic beasts movies. I watched her chase marginalized teenagers with a double digit follower count off of twitter for daring to criticize her thought process, and no one with any kind of power standing against her because she was the one who was paying them. This isn't to say Harry Potter is without flaws. This is to say she really didn't give a shit about that. Getting rich and powerful is a hell of a drug, and she had enough sycophants that she had no reason to care about what her critics were saying.
She was convinced that she was a martyr; a voice for the unheard; a leader for the ages, so of course her detractors were the bad guys. And I think we should take this to heart. We should see this as an example of how easy it is to get radicalized; if you think of yourself as a paragon of virtue, you are going to think that whatever you see as good and right is an objective fact. Most people don't know this, but the majority of terfs start out as trans allies. You are not immune to propaganda! You are not immune to falling into dangerous ideologies!!!
This is why the most important thing you can do as an activist is to listen. Do NOT think you're above being wrong; do NOT develop a god complex; do NOT form an identity out of being right all the time. Involve yourselves in the groups you claim to speak for. Listen to trans women; share resources that help trans women; familiarize yourself with the diversity of experiences that trans people have and the struggles they face.
No, none of you are as bad as JKR because you don't have her money or her power. You will likely never have the capacity for harm she does. But check yourselves. Do not affirm yourselves into thinking you always have the moral high ground. Watch yourselves; humble yourselves; check yourselves for signs of cult behavior and internalized prejudice. You are always learning. You will always be learning. Do not allow yourselves to get a power trip from brushing off marginalized voices.
#copied from prev:#harry potter was not a covert attempt to brainwash children into fascism#they're very milquetoast 1990s british liberal#she used to fucking hate the tories#and yes there WERE some tells in her books that she had ye olde unexamined biases
#but in the wake of her going off the deep end people have twisted that into#''she was always a hateful bigot and hp was actually a nefarious attempt to corrupt children into sharing her bigotry''
#and like#no#she was once a well-meaning fairly progressive normie who just didn't think too hard about her own background assumptions about the world#and then she got famous and then she got older and she got radicalized by people who targeted her on purpose because she had#enough money and cultural caché to turn into real influence
#and she was completely unprepared to defend her worldview from people who were telling her that her knee-jerk reaction was always right#and anyone who said otherwise was not only a jerk but also a dangerous villain who wanted to hurt her and other innocent women and girls
#and y'all are not nearly as immune to those tactics as a lot of you think you are
#fuck the ghoul that jkr has become but the story of how she got here is not the story of a crypto-fascist who made it into mainstream#it is the cautionary tale of a normal decent person who fell down a bad rabbithole and got swallowed up by a hate movement
#re-writing history so you can pretend she was always evil won't protect you from sharing her fate
#you have to put in the effort to interrogate your own biases and your own knee-jerk disgust reactions#you have to take a minute every so often to step back and CHECK if you have ended up in an echo chamber bubble and touch grass a little
#because radicalization doesn't happen overnight and it can happen to any of us#it's very easy to let yourself believe that you're Correct and anyone who disagrees with you is Obviously Evil
#you have to force yourself to double-check that notion from time to time and to hang onto EXACTLY what it is that makes the other side wron#you can't just say ''well they're conservatives so obviously they're evil'' because that is how you wind up at ''these men are hurting youn#''girls by PRETENDING to be women in order to take advantage of the protections feminists have spent decades fighting for! and we shouldn't#''even be surprised really - men are awful after all. all they do is TAKE from women and PREY ON young girls. we all know this from our own#''bad experiences with men. and we were right to hate them for it! you see!!'' and whoops now you're a fucking terf
#it's easy it's so easy it's so fucking easy and i promise you i PROMISE you there is a hate group out there who has your fucking number#no matter how good and progressive and leftist you think you are there is SOMETHING that could radicalize you into hate if you let it#there is an argument about how certain people are Just Fundamentally Evil that would appeal to you and make sense to you
Sometimes I forget people aren't multishippers then I see someone talking about how they used to ship something then got a new ship and I'm like what do you mean you aren't just collecting ships like cool rocks you see on the ground
@ellorypurebloodculture is the reason for like half of my rock collection
🤣🤣🤣
I accept all the blame.
If I didn’t follow you I’d be all alone... Being lonely is more painful than getting hurt!
Au fucking revoir Mister Prince
I had thought about if Luffy had recruited the Strawhats in a different order and they got to see different crewmates origins/events leading up to becoming pirates, and well-
Zoro's whole first-meeting ordeal might have left a different first-impression with Sanji
Sometimes I wish I could go back to school
But this time
I would get to do it right
No insane nonsense dragging me down
(Being actually properly medicated)
No societal pressure to do well
There’s so much of this world that I don’t know
That I could understand
If only I was given a chance
I was worried about getting into college
And doing well in class
And hating maths
(I hated things that were difficult for me to understand
Because a bad grade could feel like life or death)
Now, I’m interested. I want to know more
But I’ve long graduated, and school is over and done for
I wish I could return and do it over
And actually learn about everything, with no other thought in mind.
But it is too late and I’m grown now
So I guess I’ll watch random classes on YouTube
I think about Azula shooters often and their common refrain of "if Azula hadn't had a mental breakdown, she would've won" and I'm here to tell you that no, she wouldn't have.
There is no universe in which Azula was winning that fight with Zuko (or Katara, for that matter).
Azula spent so much of Book 2 being built up as this deadly terrifying force against whom the heroes are badly outmatched that it can be difficult to catch exactly how quickly Zuko is advancing.
Back up a bit to Book One. For the fearsome exiled crown prince of the Fire Nation, Zuko's not that impressive a firebender. He's not bad by any stretch, and he's able to lay the untrained Sokka and Katara flat pretty easily. Then he gets in the ring with Aang, who is an airbending master, and the difference between a regular bender and a master becomes apparent when Aang literally puts his ass to bed:
People have attributed this to the fact that no one's fought an airbender in 100 years, but I think it's also worth noting that Aang (a 12 year old from a pacifist nation) has probably never fought anyone before. Like, ever. And yet the second Aang thinks "okay, I'll attack back", the fight's over.
Zuko's got the same genetic predisposition for firebending talent that Azula does, yet it never seems to manifest because of his mental blocks. At the beginning of the series, he's already so beat down that all he really has is conviction, pride, and anger, so even with training from Iroh (the firebending master, thank you very much), he struggles. Yet throughout Book 2, when he has no time to train because he's on the run, he actually seems to advance faster. The fact that his bending is literally tied to his character arc (as his morals become tangled and he has to fight off aforementioned mental blocks) is pretty brilliant. Like, by the time of the Crossroads of Destiny, Zuko getting his ass handed to him by Aang is a pretty consistent feature of the show--he just can't match wits with him.
Hell, at the beginning of the series, he and Iroh (again: the actual firebending master) launch a combined power surface-to-air attack...which Aang casually swats away into a nearby ice wall. Come the Crossroads of Destiny, however, and Zuko by himself launches this bigass fireball that blows through Aang's defenses.
Zuko advances so quickly that it's scary. That prodigious talent is in him even if it doesn't come through as cleanly as with Azula. Who, by the way, was busy about to get flattened by Katara some few dozen feet away, until Zuko took over and then effectively stalemated her himself.
All of this in retrospect makes it abundantly clear why Zuko's firebending seemed to skyrocket so much when he learned true firebending from the Sun Warriors: it was really the only thing left. He's hard a hard road learning how to fight waterbenders, earthbenders, and airbenders, and even if unconsciously, he's applying the philosophy Iroh taught him about augmenting his bending style with aspects of other styles (see also, the waterbending-like fire whips he uses in the above gif). Once he actually understands fire and how it works, he's got it mastered. Hence why any gap between him and Azula effectively disappears as soon as their next fight--before her friends have betrayed her and her stability goes out the window. There's no real sense of urgency to their fight at the Boiling Rock prison. True, Sokka's presence with the sword helps, but Zuko doesn't look remotely worried and he counters Azula's every attack perfectly.
All her life, Azula only ever learned fire. She was taught by the best people the fire nation can employ, so she knows all the cool tricks, but she's still poisoned by the corrupted firebending practiced in the modern ATLA timeline. Unlike Zuko, who managed to get the basics if nothing else from Iroh (fire comes from the breath, and can be used to survive as much as to kill), Azula has always used fire as a weapon and a means to hurt others. She has no true knowledge of the craft, meaning she's got the same weaknesses as Zhao, she's just better disciplined to the point she can make up for it.
Zuko's victory was a given considering Azula's complete loss of control by the time of Sozin's comet, but even had she been in a perfect mental state, she'd have lost, because in many ways Zuko is simply the better firebender.
And that's the truth of it.
And even if Azula got DID get through Zuko, she would then have to deal with the girl that went from ‘untrained mess’ to ‘one of the greatest benders alive’ in a year.
Katara is just as talented as Azula. She just didn’t have all the resources money could buy when growing up.