i get why people don't believe in marriage as a social construct but legally it is the best and easiest way to say "this is who i trust to take care of me when i can't take care of myself" and i'm so glad gay people fought for that right bc when shit gets scary at least i know im in good hands
bro, i desperately need people to learn that romance is an actual, literal genre of fiction. if you do not like a complete focus on romance and only like romantic plotlines incorporated into various other plots - you do not like the romance genre and you are not interested in romance fiction. simple as that. and it's fine if you don't like it, but pretending like the entire genre doesn't exist and is actually all badly written fiction of other genres which is overly focused on romance is asinine. yet somehow continues being a sentiment i see all the time. romance fiction is not lacking in plot or over-concerned with romantic relationships - it's literally doing what it was designed to do: centers mostly or even exclusively around romance.
Excerpted from the poem Hand Me Downs by Sarah Kay
read below the cut
I know you’ve taken to wearing around your father’s hand-me-down anger. But I wish that you wouldn’t. It’s a few sizes too big and everyone can see it doesn’t fit you, makes you look silly, hangs loose at all the wrong places, even if it does match your skin colour.
I know you think you’ll grow into it, that your arms will beef up after all the fighting and it will sit on your shoulders if you pin it on the right places with well-placed conviction. The bathroom mirror tells you you look good in it, that it makes your fists look a lot more justified, when you dig your hands deep into the pockets you’ll find stories hidden he left there for you to hand out to the other boys like car bombs.
And on days when everything else is slipping through your fingers, this you can wrap yourself inside of, this will keep you warm at night, help you drift off to sleep with a certainty that no matter what, it will still be there when you wake up. And the longer you wear it, the better it starts to fit, until some of the stories are your own. Maybe the holes in the sleeve are from the bullets you dodged yourself, so when it rips, snags on a barbed wire fence or someone else’s family, don’t worry. Cos your mother and your sister will help mend it- patch the holes, sew the tears, replace a button or two, help you back into it and tell you how proud they are of you, how good it looks on you the same way it looked on your dad, and your granddad too, and on his dad before him and on his father before him.
But back then, back then there was only sand until someone drew a line, someone built a wall, someone threw a stone. And the crack in the skull that it hit fractured perfectly outward, like twigs on the branches on the limbs of a family tree. So someone threw a stone back, and each fracture, each tiny break wound itself together into thread and the thread pulled itself around him- your great-great-great-great somebody.
And on the other side of that wall they were knitting just as fast, and theirs fit them just as well but only slightly different shade. So I’m asking, when the time comes, who’s gonna be the first one to put down the needle and thread? Who’s gonna be the first one to remember that their grandpa suffered just as many broken windows, broken hearts, broken bones, in the first time you come down to dinner and your son is sitting at the dining table with your hatred on his shoulders, who’s gonna tell him it’s finally time to take it off?
getting scambot messages from random accounts that clearly used to be normal active blogs is sad enough. you know that there used to be a real person on that blog until they were tricked into handing their password to the digital fae.
but it's an entirely new level of tragic when somebody you've actually spoken to gets turned into a bot account. it's like peeking at a zombie apocalypse through the window and realizing one of the shambling corpses was your friend.
and then the zombie catches sight of you, lurches up to your window, and shouts through the glass that they accidentally reported your account to tumblr and you'll be deactivated unless you click this link.
RIP to the blog that used to DM me to tell me they liked my new chapters. Their last known words spoken before being turned, 17 hours ago: "Ggs!" They were praising someone's deadlift.
the message they tried to get me with is probably the same message that got them, so for anybody who hasn't already been warned about the signs of a zombie account:
if you get something like this ↑ they're gonna follow up by instructing you to contact tumblr support on discord and give you contact info; or they're gonna link a website that looks sort of like tumblr support and say you have to email them; or any variety of "you must now contact tumblr, here is how you contact tumblr."
whatever they send you, it Does Not lead to tumblr. it leads to the master zombie that bit them and inducted them into the ranks of the undead, and will bite you the second they have your email and password. i might be confusing zombies and vampires. anyway,
it's easier to fall for these messages because the blog doesn't LOOK like a bot blog, because it ISN'T a bot blog. it's a normal person's blog that got accessed by a bot, meaning the blog's content CLEARLY looks like a real active user when you click on it. and yes—it might even be a blog you already know. sometimes bots like this go down a blog's DMs or reblogs and message people they've previously interacted with.
they got one of my treasured followers, and they can get you too. don't fall for their tricks. know the signs.
we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason
i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3
unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it
i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map
i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs
this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.
crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.
being late getting into a piece of media or joining a ‘dead’ fandom is not that bad actually cause even if it seems like the party is over there will always be people still celebrating and the decoration is still up and there’s a piece of cake reserved especially for you in the fridge you just have to come and enjoy it.
“How were LGBT people able to hijack the rainbow!?!”
Uhh, well Jake, we started using the rainbow to connote gayness and you immediately stopped using it because you were pants shittingly afraid of looking gay.
i literally JUST finished your tvl 3x01 reaction and can i just say i love, respect, and Adore you for resisting trailers, avoiding spoilers, etc.,, as someone who's read the first 3 books (iwtv, tvl, qotd) and the 6th (the vampire armand) it makes me SO incredibly happy to see you going in completely blind and makes your reaction 200% more enjoyable. i may be drunk right now, but even when i'm sober, i'll still mean this: thank you, thank you, thank you.
you're legitimately my favourite reactor out there (honestly, have been for Years), and the joy you feel is so completely genuine and infectious, and that's kind of hard to find these days in reaction channels. may your pillows always be cold and life always go nothing less but amazing for you and the wife. please look after yourself <333