Person on screen: needs a couple pats of butter, a splash of olive oil, simmered on low with a bay leaf and a cinnamon stick. What?! You never seen a boy who knows his way around the kitchen?
Yeah my mom always wanted a little girl but she got stuck with me instead. That wasn’t gonna stop her though so all my friends were opening up nerf guns and bmx bikes on their birthday, I was getting crockpots.
(scene changes to the person dressed in a nice black suit jacket, bright pink dress shirt, and black tie) Yeah laugh it up! Take a picture while you’re at it 'cause this is the last time you’ll ever see me in a suit! How do boys wear these things??
(scene changes to the person dressed in the same shirt and tie with no jacket and the shirt cuffs unbuttoned and rolled up, with purple nail polish on their nails) No, I don’t know how to fight. I was only ever taught how to deescalate situations with healthy communication and emotional validation.
Sometimes i feel like younger queer kids are getting a bit to bold with openly talking to people they don’t know In The Context Of:
More than once i have had a younger/same age queer person come up to me in public settings and say something about “finding other gays” or clearly clocking me as nonbinary and I’m like :)))))))) hey buddy I’m here with my conservative parents can you fucking not out me :))))))))
Just say you like my outfit or hair and move on, fuck even tell me you like my shoelaces. Don’t call me gay and limp your wrist at me when you don’t even know me? Especially when there’s a bunch of ppl around?
i was out with my ex once when three *very* young queer kids, like thirteen years old, came up to us and asked us “are you guys, you know…” and did the limp wrist thing at us. one of them loudly exclaimed that it was so cool to meet other queer people in real life. this was in public in an unbelievably conservative area - we didn’t even feel safe holding hands because we were surrounded by Mormons. we got lucky that day, but I’m begging y’all to remember that the world doesn’t work like the internet. other queers are real fuckin people. don’t do this shit. OP is right; tell me you like my jacket, or my patches, or the rainbow spokes on my wheelchair, but don’t out either of us!
This used to be standard operating procedure not even ten years ago: NEVER OUT OTHER QUEERS, even if they’re supposedly already out. Never assume that it’s okay to let third parties know that so-and-so is queer. Ever. You never know when you’ve found the one uncle with the heart condition that they can’t bear to risk telling, or the one neighbor who’s just threatening enough that they don’t mention it around, or even the grandma that they haven’t gotten around to mentioning it to yet. You might have just ruined a very important milestone for someone, or you could have put them at actual risk of harm.
Also… stop freaking assuming. If you don’t see a pride flag on them, please don’t just assume. You can’t tell ANYTHING about a person’s gender or partner preferences by what they’re wearing on any given day, what their hair looks like, or whether or not they’re using makeup. You legit cannot, and you look like a jerk when you try.
Younger queer people have grown up in a better world, but we’re in a time of backsliding right now. Do NOT out other queer people. Also, I’m not gonna tell you how to present yourselves in public………..but please, I am begging you to re-evaluate HOW safe you are in the current climate.
i mean this so seriously if you have any sort of creative project you can and should be a little obsessed with it. you should reread your own writing and look at your own art and brag about your ocs its literally good for your health
parents are allowed to straight-up torture their kids with zero consequences. they can withhold food and water, lock you out of shelter, confiscate your belongings, bar you from human contact, attack and harm you and exert complete control over your physical appearance. and this is just the norm. if you speak out against it you're seen as a delinquent or a predator. even otherwise progressive people get uncomfortable with the idea of dismantling the nuclear family unit because they still see it as the best way to keep kids safe when that simply couldn't be further from the truth. it's evil.
This is also part of why I'm so loud about homeschool reform, specifically in the USA.
In the US, there is no meaningful legal definition for educational/academic neglect in any of the 50 states or federally. What this means is that a child can be "homeschooled" and exclusively be taught how to cook and clean, reach the age of 18 being unable to read, write, or count, and this alone is not considered neglect. That 18yo, should they even have the knowledge that suing exists, has no legal grounds to sue their parents for denying them an education.
In over 40 US states, a convicted child abuser can homeschool their children. So someone who has done time for child abuse and somehow regains access to their child(ren) can decide upon returning home that they want to "homeschool" their kids. Those children are now locked in a home with their abuser where nobody can see them.
There are no welfare checks.
There are no routine assessments.
There aren't even databases — state or federal — keeping track of how many homeschooled kids there actually are.
Meaning a child can be locked in their home for their entire life with their convicted abuser, learn absolutely nothing, never go to the doctor, and so long as that child is fed, clothed, and the abuse isn't physical or sexual, that child has almost no chance of rescue and no legal ground to seek restitution if/when they escape.
The only way homeschooled children get rescued is if they're beaten, starved, or physically neglected and they're able to get the right person to see that. Otherwise? They have to wait until someone finds out they were murdered as a result of their parents "homeschooling".
And feral homeschool parents love to jump down my throat about this, and then get even more pissed when I tell them I'm a homeschool alumni.
Because I know it's not all homeschoolers. But even one is too many, and the lack of protections should scare everyone. If you're a good homeschool parent, nothing will change. If not, you deserve whatever comes your way as a result of adequate oversight.
It's not all homeschoolers... but it's certainly most of the homeschoolers who don't want protections and regulation. The ones who are homeschooling for the right reasons benefit from guidelines and benchmarks being in place.
idk who needs to hear this but it’s healthier for you to just accept that you’re gonna be kinda fat than it is to live the rest of your life miserably trying to monitor yourself to maintain a skinny weight your body doesn’t want to hold onto
I've been meaning to make a post talking about my stroke because y'all got bits and pieces of the recovery but I never actually told the story of HOW it went down and the thing is the type of stroke I had is usually the type young people have and since having mine i've now heard multiple stories of people under 40 having very similar strokes and the scary thing is, is that they didn't get help right away. Because you're young and healthy and sure you feel weird but it'll pass right? but it doesn't, and it gets worse, and by the time you get to the hospital (some people literally take days to go) the deficits are worse and recovery is harder.
so here's a super long post about strokes in general, and mine in particular/what I went through.
So for strokes the signs are abbreviated BE FAST. Balance loss, Eyesight changes, Face drooping, Arm weakness, Speech difficulty, -> Time to call 911.
Had I known those MAYBE I would have figured it out but my symptoms were a little mixed. I was reading (fanfic!) in bed because it was a sunday morning and i had nothing pressing to do and suddenly got dizzy. I put my laptop aside because my eyes were blurring (Eyesight changes - symptom #1), and laid down, thinking it would pass, it didn't, it's a little vague how it progressed because I'd been having headaches and neckpain for about 3 weeks leading up to it so I was like 'idk is this a migraine?' (headaches can be a stroke symptom so symptom #2) but i got nauseous and eventually got up and to my utmost surprise I immediately fell over as if I was the drunkest of frat bros. The room literally spun before my eyes as I fell to the floor (Balance loss - symptom #3). I have had some Nights and I had never been that unsteady before. I crawled my way to the bathroom, threw up (nausea - not a common stroke symptom) , took 800mg of ibuprofen, and crawled back to bed.
if you know anything about ibuprofen you might know it's a mild blood thinner and that's a high dose. I may have inadvertently helped myself with that one. I was just feeling like shit and thinking 'idk this might help'
At this point I still thought we were still in Normal Land. Sure, it was a weird morning, but Surely There Was A Reason. (Yes There Was) Anyway, as I'm lying there willing my body to stop suffering I realize my arm is going numb (stroke symptom #4) and I switch positions, because weird, but it doesn't go away, and I gave it a good little while. I'm on a medication that can make my limbs tingle but it usually just does it to my fingers and it dissipates quickly but this wasn't dissipating, and then I realized one of my legs was also going numb. Then one side of my face is going numb.
(at the time I did not look in the mirror but I had a drooping eyelid - symptom #5)
Those all seem bad. I grab my computer and google 'when to go to the hospital for dizzyness' as that felt like the worst of my problems. and indeed the list I found highlighted that if you are also experiencing loss of balance, blurred vision, nausea, and limb numbness, you should see a doctor. That seems like far too many symptoms to be having all to be listed. I grab my phone (thankfully plugged in and by my bed), and start layering on more clothing because it's about 10 degrees out and i'm in a pajama dress. The very nice man at 911 talks with me and sends an ambulance, I tell him I don't think I can get out the front door of my building on my own and he asks if I can get to MY apartment door to which I say yes and he assures me that's fine they will have keys to my building.
(I have been since informed they love to chop down doors but no, I could get that far)
I wait by my door laying down on the ground and they arrive pretty quickly. They see to me in the hallway, which is more of a lobby in my building and the only place with room for me to lie down (I cannot stand unassisted at this point) they ask me a bunch of questions, take vitals, and ask me where I would like to be taken. Me, having never had to go to the fucking hospital in an emergency before, simply go 'wherever is close' because I again, I am having a stroke and do not have the wherewithal to think through these things.
A big firefighter helps me down the stairs (it's only a half flight and I still almost did not make it) and we get underway.
At the hospital they wheel me into triage and I mostly lie there gratefully and answer some questions and respond to some tests (grip strength, following a pen with my eyes, that sort of thing) and then I hear what is great when you've been at urgent care for two hours but what is Very Bad when you just arrived in an ambulance and that's 'She's next'. I jumped the line for a CT scan and an MRI. I was there less than ten minutes before I was actively being scanned. honestly closer to five.
my active symptoms seem to have been worse than some of the stories I've heard, not being able to walk AT ALL in particular, although some other are pretty equal (Footless Jo on youtube had a stroke around the same time I did of the same type and has discussed hers, she delayed going in despite the severity for a variety of reasons and it sounds like her recovery has been difficult) My recovery was pretty easy because i was actively being cared for and on blood thinners right away. I was pretty out of it in the beginning, but I was only in the hospital for 6 days and then in a rehab for another 4 to relearn how to walk and balance, then i was released unto the world and just spent time going to physical therapy and recovering for awhile. I was out of work for about 8 weeks total. I basically had the best outcome for a stroke. I recovered almost fully back to 100% (I'm about 2% less sure footed than I used to be, but it's rarely noticeable), my face still feels a little weird but has markedly improved so I live in hope it will eventually get back to normal. It massively sucked. But strokes can fuck you up for life and I came out a weird medical story to tell and have to take some extra medication now/precautions to take (i cannot do certain types of yoga, no weightlifting, no push ups, no going on rollercoasters.... things that could strain my neck essentially) but overall I escaped very lucky.
For anyone who has ever had covid before, please be sure you are aware of stroke symptoms. Each successive infection raises the risk in a pretty major way, and a lot of people are dying young due to not knowing these signs or being afraid to act on them. Please take care of yourselves.
Severance is a cool show. Because, like. What if you knew nothing. No context. No idea who you are. No history. And, of course, you are scared, but you can’t leave unless you get permission from someone— the person who put you here— someone who will never listen. Someone who makes all the decisions, who says “I’m a grown-up person and you’re not.” And you’re naive and lonely, but at least there’s other people in the same boat as you. Someone, just been there slightly longer, is trying to shield you, trying to protect you, taking responsibility and taking on punishment they “can handle and grow from.”
Like. Oh yeah. I recognize this one. Someone else dresses you. Someone else feeds you. Someone else, who's just like you, but they get everything. The little toys and the waffle party. Helly is desperate and suicidal, but she still has to go to school work. You have to do work that doesn't make sense, but you'll understand eventually. The meaningless, manufactured rivalry between departments. The rumors??? “they have larvae that eat them?” “I’m livestock grown for food” “I’m a bodybuilder who has loads of girlfriends, but you don’t know them they go to a different school?” Punishment in the form of apologizing over and over, having to use all the right words, until you are believed. Endless hallways. Scary authority figures. "Are you mad at me?" Religion being the only type of media you see, until you read some shitty book that changes your life. Confusing, sudden camping trips that are supposed to fix you. Condescension. The words "innie" and "outie" are brought up multiple times as infantilizing. Of course his innie's voice is higher pitched????
Everything you're forced to do -- and everything done to you -- is for your benefit, you're told... but not for the benefit of YOU-you. For the benefit of an alternate version of you, a version of you that you can't communicate with, a version of you that you don't even know really exists, but that everyone assures you is you and is, in fact, the version of you that matters more than and should be prioritized over YOU-you. You're not allowed to question this.
Yeah. Reminds me a lot of a kid's Hypothetical Adult Self.
Your future self will understand. Your future self will thank me. Your future self will want you to have done this. This is for your (future self's) own good.
Kid Me wasn't supposed to ask "If I'll want this when I'm older, why can't I just wait to do it until I'm older and want this?"
The appeal of severance, at least as we've been shown it so far, is that subjects can have unpleasant experiences (childbirth, a tedious workday, a dental exam) already having happened, to skip directly to the "afterward" and have the unpleasant experience actually experienced by another, lesser version of yourself. Right?
Which is also how a lot of adults feel about children -- either their own retrospective child selves, or the children currently in their lives (whose lives must be structured to best serve their future adult selves). The purpose of childhood is to get unpleasant experiences over with so that the Future Adult Self (the self-that-matters) can have them already over with.
It's so telling that the boss at the door factory who interviews Dylan compares severance to circumcision -- a surgery commonly performed on infants, without medical necessity, based purely on the justification "They'll want/need it done as adults." Now, that's not necessarily true (the world is fully of happily uncircumcised adults), but even if if were, it would raise the inevitable question "Then why not wait until they want/need it as adults?" and the answer is "Because surgery is unpleasant and we assume adults don't want to go through it. The Future Adult Self (the self-that-matters) will want this surgery to already have happened, to have been experienced by the Lesser (childhood) Self."
And people even do this with learning skills!
"I wish my parents had made me learn to play piano as a kid."
Why can't you learn to play piano now? What's stopping you?
What you mean is "I wish I were already good at piano-playing, I wish the awkward, frustrating, beginner stages of learning piano-playing had already been gotten over with by my Lesser Self who exists to get unpleasant things out of the way for Me, the Self Who Matters."
You gotta be really publicly passionate about things if you want your friends to text you. Bc people will forget to text you because they’re human. But if you’re really openly the friend who loves identifying ants your friends will think of you when they see ants. And they’ll text you “what ant is this [blurry photo]”. And then they’ll ask you how you’ve been and we should get coffee sometime. But if they don’t know what you love they’ll never know what you like
And then when the ant convention is in town they’ll be like dude… we should go to the ant convention. But they would never think to go if they didn’t know u loved ants
trying to explain why Dishonored is basically my favourite video game is like. Well. The voice acting is, primarily bad. The entire combat system revolves around killing, eating, starving, or befriending rats. There are only 10 lines of ambient dialogue and I love all of them. You can never see the protagonist or hear him in the first game, but he has big dick energy so inconceivably strong that it hardly matters. The game’s lore and themes are morally nuanced, but every single person you meet falls into one of four camps (“helpless civilian”, “guy who’s just following orders, “ontologically evil”, and “crippled with guilt and choking on regret). They went off *unbelievably* hard with the world building. The majority of it is hidden in gay poetry and the diary entries of the man who killed your wife. Attention is lovingly poured into the mundane and fantastical aspects of life, and each wound or injustice suffered is a serious part of the narrative that characters are expected to carry with them for the rest of their lives. The pinnacle of the game happens when two Greeks, asexual and bisexual respectively, have a time travelling sword fight on top of what is basically the crumbling ruins of the World Trade Center. best game I have ever played hands down.
