just two dudes in a trenchcoat, being a girl

Relearning how to be a person and figuring out spiritual shit all in one go. I reblog NSFW sometimes and am a crotchety adult with questionable tastes in fiction.

[homeofthebasin]

If you are a one piece blog or a ds9 blog hello this is my main blog I don't talk about those things here. I have side blogs for that.

[bough-keeper]

"i forgive myself for what i did" and "i should not have done that" are two statements that can and should coexist. you can forgive yourself while holding yourself accountable. you can understand that you fucked up while also understanding that you're human.

[jkottke]

Marjane Satrapi, author of the excellent Persepolis, has died at age 56. Friends said she “died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life”.

[prokopetz]

I genuinely think a lot of complaints about short-lived fandoms amount to grumping about Kids These Days™. The overwhelming majority of all media throughout history has vanished beneath the surface of our cultural consciousness without making a ripple. Robust and long-lived fandoms have always been the exception rather than the rule. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot wrong with the feast-or-famine churn of the contemporary streaming model and its obsession with fostering constant growth over long-term retention, and that definitely has a big effect on which particular media floats to the surface, but the mere fact that nobody gives a shit about your favourite TV show a year after it stopped airing? Welcome to practically every show ever made!

[prokopetz]

(Plus, it's not like modern media doesn't often enjoy tremendous advantages in spite of the streaming fuckery. There are people out there keeping the flame alive for a children's cartoon that aired on a single regional station in 1989 and got cancelled after three episodes, and that prestige adaptation of your favourite video game couldn't hack it after being globally distributed for three seasons? Tragic.)

[ghosthorse-tracks]

Lesser-known steps of the writing process:

Finding all the paragraphs where you used some hyper-specific word more than once

Rearranging paragraphs that you swear you wrote in the right order but turned out to be totally backwards

Going for a walk, coming up with the perfect line, and forgetting it as soon as you get home and open your laptop

Creating a separate document where you can dump all of those nice sentences that no longer fit in anywhere

Waking up in a cold sweat because so-and-so was supposed to be barefoot but never actually took his shoes off

[inkskinned]

Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

I’m not worth the cost of a watch.

[inkskinned]

i wrote this while i was working at orlando’s walt disney world parks.

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

we are both worth more than the watch, anyway.

[boybeetles]

There’s no mobility aids in the game so I just gave him a pet cane

[angelnumber27]

Temple T-Kimono by T-Michael, modelled by Paul Marcel M.

Kvant-1 Studios, 2020

[succubusboyfriend]

are you “adaptable” or are you just willing to subject yourself to existing in low key background-level ambient misery

[succubusboyfriend]

these are different things btw. actual adaptability means not dealing with being miserable long term. and being constantly mildly annoyed/frustrated with a situation but being “able to deal with it” counts as ambient misery. btw.

[succubusboyfriend]

let this be your sign to make your life just a little more livable. get a dollar store trash can for your bedside so Cup City’s invasion plans fall through. block a tag or post that makes you grind your teeth every time you see it. get some grip pads so your bed stops sliding across the hardwood a little bit every time you get in it. tell that person you need a little more support. if you get annoyed at a situation more than a couple times, change it. don’t be content with being miserable.

[demonprincex]

and the more that you start doing this, the better you will get at detecting your own feelings and advocating for yourself! This is an important start to being more of a person in the world if you struggle with that

[algorithmist]

Philly Cops Admit That They’re Tracking “First Amendment Activity” Critical of AI

A law enforcement document obtained by The Intercept shows police scan social media looking for posts opposing AI data centers.

(archive link)

Some of the anti-AI posts included in the document reflect hyperbolic anti-AI rhetoric that is widespread across social media, including an unnamed internet user who “indicated a desire to ‘burn down’ data centers.” Other examples of potentially terroristic posts included references to a fictional anti-robot movement in the science fiction novel “Dune” and a Facebook meme. The fusion center, housed inside the Philadelphia Police Department, warned that “disruptive First Amendment activity” is an “indicator” of risk from “Domestic Violent Extremists,” an expansive term favored by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.

are you or have you ever been a participant in the butlerian jihad?

[adrianicsea]

Do you not like Twenty Øne Piløts?

the fact that you took the time to put the slashes in the Os tells me that this is probably not a conversation we should have

[pink-vacancy]

˖⁺‧₊⟡₊˚⊹

[doubleca5t]

[bk-poetry]

Announcing Fanfiction.lol !

hey all! i've built a new ao3 fork called fanfiction.lol 🤙🏽 key differences:

🚫 no invite queue: sign up and start posting immediately. no waiting, no velvet rope.

🏳️‍🌈 expanded content warnings: added ableism, homophobia/transphobia, racism, rpf and more. plus relationship tags for aro/ace spectrum, qpr, non-binary/genderqueer focus, poly/ensemble, and more.

🏷️ all tags are canonical: everything you tag goes into the searchable record. no volunteer wrangling bottleneck.

💜 fandom-agnostic moderation: i care about the writing, not fandom politics or discourse. write whatever you want, tag it honestly.

it's a small personal project but fan communities deserve independent infrastructure.

if you enjoy fandom, i'd love for you to sign up and poke around. tell me what breaks. the source code is at source.tube/brennan/fanfiction.lol.

find me at brennan.day/accounts or email [email protected].

write whatever the hell you want! 💜

[bk-poetry]

More Information

Hi, I wanted to add some more info about fanfic.lol based on some replies. I was trying to keep the original post short and have done write-ups elsewhere but I'll reiterate here.

The admin/webmaster: I'm Brennan! I'm a Queer Red River Métis writer and webdev and huge advocate for the IndieWeb. You can get to know to me on my site, brennan.day

I made this for fun, and it's running using a homelab server in my basement. I don't make money or anything else. I'm just doing it for the love of ball.

fanfic.lol is meant to be a small, independent alternative for fanfic and fandom that prioritizes joy and fun. No aims at trying to replace AO3!

I am anti-genAI and so is the site. You can read more about my stance on AI here.

Archive warnings, like everything else, are under construction! I do have to adhere to the laws of my country (Canada). Please be patient.

I am pushing straight to production, which is to say the entire site could explode at anytime, so please do not use it as the only place you put things! :)

I forsee only a handful of people using this site, it def isn't for everyone. If you don't like it that's okay! Whether you want to give me input or just ignore it entirely.

I did a longer write-up here. Thank you everyone for the kind, warm reception of my silly little project. <3

[olderthannetfic]

I love the longer write-up. It gives me a much better sense of where you're coming from and why people should trust you—or which users would be a good fit.

I was there for the start of AO3, and we really did think we were going to usher in the next age of archives a la eFiction. It took too long for AO3's code to be in that kind of shape and the internet changed radically around us. We did not mean to create a behemoth. We just wanted venture capital bros to stop disrespecting us.

As a side note, all the comments you're getting like "There already is a fanfiction website. Wtf" are exactly what people said about AO3/OTW in 2007. There was a ton of bitching about us stealing FFN's idea. (Never mind that there were older archives.) There were frequent complaints about how there was already "an archive" and we didn't need another. Most of that discussion got deleted when FFN decided to nuke all of its inactive social spaces one Thanksgiving weekend while nobody was around to object or save their data. But I was there and I remember it and it sounded exactly like these comments now.

The oldschool core of AO3 was into the age of archives. We liked there being lots of different little spaces run by different fans. It's nice to see that energy floating around in 2026. Go indieweb!

I wish you a hundred invested users who want to form a community and nobody else.

[pillowspace]

Nearly blocked someone for a vaguely annoying reply they made in 2017 then remembered 2017 was 9 years ago. They will live. We can change *opens their blog* nevermind they got worse. Guards

[rimonoroni2]

what people don’t understand about how adhd is disabling is that it’s not just getting temporarily distracted from, like, school work or hobbies. it’s getting distracted/being unable to motivate yourself to go to the doctor, eat regularly, do hygiene tasks, etc. it’s not knowing when or how long it will take you to do something, ANYTHING, and in many cases that thing is taking a shower or keeping your house from turning into a biohazard. it’s about being fundamentally incapable of controlling your attention and focus on anything, even and especially things you need to do to survive.

[vidibit]

Mutuals who I have hardly spoken with but we instead communicate through silently liking and reblogging each other's posts... I hope you're all having a lovely day ✨

[ghostoffuturespast]

[moghedien]

I feel like I need to share this because idk if Europeans are familiar with the presence of Aldi in the US, but at least especially in my area they’ve been growing a lot recently. Like Aldi bought out some local failing grocery chains where I live (Louisiana) and have opened Aldis in all these somewhat rural communities and small towns, which for the record I’m fine with

But as a result of this they are advertising a lot more in my area and also in many cases, the people in these areas have never been confronted with Aldi or any European grocery store. So the ads that Aldi is pushing out to its new US customer base feature a cowboy shopping at Aldi who is explaining to new Aldi customers how Aldi works. Like this cowboy is explaining you gotta put a quarter in the shopping cart and why there are very little name brands. A cowboy is how they want to reach their American customer base. They gave us a cowboy

[moghedien]

Here he is, the Aldi Cowboy