I Don’t Wanna Be Straightbaited @queenellis - Tumblr Blog

I'm still a trekkie at heart even if I refuse to get paramount plus and am too lazy to pirate a whole show........mmmmmmmnnm star trek my love I miss you......m...m.......(crawling darkly) (shuddering) (twisting) (roaring) (crawling darkly) (convulsing) (walking twisted) (attack regardless of target)

dax-spots

If anyone wants to watch Star Trek episodes or movies without Paramount Plus, here’s a link to a Google drive :) It has all of the series, and the episodes I’ve watched all had subtitles. I just watch episodes in the drive video player, which is a lot easier than pirating sites and better than paramount plus.

catboyelimgarak

Oh my goodness, thank you so much! And they’re subtitled! After they took it off Amazon Prime I had to watch on my movie/show site that didn’t have subtitles for Trek and my brain needed it so badly for many scenes.

Thank you!!

krakensdottir

Older GO asks (and answers!) from Neil Gaiman’s inbox

SO, I have been wading in Good Omens meta for months now, and I often see things come up that Neil has actually addressed in asks. Trouble is, his ask box is deep and intimidating, and since season 2 was announced all the pre-season 2 asks have basically been buried. But I went hunting long ago for basically anything GO-related and I took screenshots of a bunch. So I thought I’d present them here, roughly organized, in text form, for the benefit of anyone else who’s curious.

Of course, none of this is meant to invalidate headcanons or whatever; Neil himself is firmly against doing so. But I’ve personally had no issue accepting author’s word with this series, since Neil has not, as yet, done anything that made me want to shout at him or eat a couch in frustration, which is a refreshing change from the writers in most of the fandoms I’ve ever been part of. So, for what it’s worth, here are the answers. At least some of them; I know I’ve missed a lot.

(And yes, they pretty much all relate to the angels and demons, Crowly and Aziraphale specifically. There were very few asks that DIDN’T concern them, and none that I have saved. Of course, the ask box is still open…)

Keep reading

neil-gaiman

Reblogging this very helpful collection of answers because I got about five of these questions in today alone.

unpretty

The Outbursts of Everett True was a comic strip that ran in papers from 1905 to 1927, wherein the aforementioned Everett True regularly beat the everliving shit out of rude people as a warning to anyone else who might consider being rude. Men have not only been taking up too much room on public transport for about as long as public transport has existed, but the people around them have been irritated about it for at least a hundred years. The next time someone tries to claim that manspreading is a false phenomenon, please direct them to this strip so that Everett True can correct their misconceptions with an umbrella upside the head.

guyalice

I have never before heard of Everett True, but if he “regularly beat the everliving shit out of rude people as a warning to anyone else who might consider being rude,” I have a strong spiritual connection with him.

froginakettle

hotcocoachia

I fucking love him

jaynavajasso

i can imagine this guy’s voice very clearly in my head but i couldn’t put a name to it

iamtypinglike98madmen-deactivat

He also jabs racists in the eye!

tumblunni

I love the justice grandpa of fists

cursedcharley

I’m very lucky to own a book that’s a collection of most of these comics (sadly not all of them) and would highly recommend hunting these down if you can. Sorry for the lack of a scanner but phone photos will just have to do.

He was a enjoyable cuss who didn’t care for war mongering.

Especially profitable war mongering and excuses for it!

He certainly didn’t like selfish husbands and fathers!

Politicians who turned on their words once they got theirs weren’t safe.

He said fuck the police!

He absolutely didn’t like people ruining little things for kids.

He stood up for foreigners. Especially those doing their best to communicate with limited second language knowledge.

He was not having any tomfoolery when it came to gun safety and laws. Especially with youth involved.

You had better not abuse a animal with him nearby. He’d right that wrong real quick!

And best of all him and his wife were both prickly cusses together. Relationship goals.

biglawbear

I have a new role model

briarchubnj

😍

runcibility

“justice grandpa of fists”

arquus-malvaceae-deactivated202

It’s nice to see a fat dude in a political cartoon that’s NOT being used as shorthand for greed and corruption.

charismat1c-megafauna

Hes like the personification of motherfucker unlimited

bogleech

Reblogging this newer version of this thread with so many more strips I haven’t seen…why did this character ever disappear. Where did you go, Everett.

tramampoline

we need him more than ever…

emperorclaudiusofficial

sorry to make a long post longer but I feel like we could all really use some Everett True Beating Up Anti-Maskers content:

dduane

He’s a hero, our Everett.

dollsahoy

Just found out there were live action Everett True shorts (silent films, though, so the outbursts were largely body language)

unseen-alumni

Reblogging to always have it to hand. :)

signerjarts

“Jolene"

Your beauty is beyond compare

I shudder from your Eldritch stare

With scaly skin and fins of emerald green

alexiswalkingonsunshine

Why would you leave this gem in the tags

ashenprincx

For decades, the medical community has ignored mountains of evidence to wage a cruel and futile war on fat people, poisoning public percepti

"For 60 years, doctors and researchers have known two things that could have improved, or even saved, millions of lives. The first is that diets do not work. Not just paleo or Atkins or Weight Watchers or Goop, but all diets. Since 1959, research has shown that 95 to 98 percent of attempts to lose weight fail and that two-thirds of dieters gain back more than they lost. The reasons are biological and irreversible. As early as 1969, research showed that losing just 3 percent of your body weight resulted in a 17 percent slowdown in your metabolism—a body-wide starvation response that blasts you with hunger hormones and drops your internal temperature until you rise back to your highest weight. Keeping weight off means fighting your body’s energy-regulation system and battling hunger all day, every day, for the rest of your life.

The second big lesson the medical establishment has learned and rejected over and over again is that weight and health are not perfect synonyms. Yes, nearly every population-level study finds that fat people have worse cardiovascular health than thin people. But individuals are not averages: Studies have found that anywhere from one-third to three-quarters of people classified as obese are metabolically healthy. They show no signs of elevated blood pressure, insulin resistance or high cholesterol. Meanwhile, about a quarter of non-overweight people are what epidemiologists call “the lean unhealthy.” A 2016 study that followed participants for an average of 19 years found that unfit skinny people were twice as likely to get diabetes as fit fat people."

A surprising article to find on the Huffington post. I think, especially towards the end, there's still a saturation of healthism and diet talk (just of the "clean eating" variety), but the information about weight discrimination is absolutely on point, especially within the medical field ignoring decades of research.

Not only do we know that weight loss isn't sustainable or possible, we also know that weight discrimination kills, in a myriad of ways. If you actually care about "health" then start unlearning your weight bias NOW and realize that fat people are just people who are a different shape.

And this article doesn't even touch on "the obesity paradox"(the fact that fat people survive heart attacks and injuries BETTER THAN thin people) or the fact that dieting, especially "yo-yo dieting," is a better predictor for heart disease than weight, and that many of the fat people who have cardiovascular diseases have a long history of dieting that (understandably) didn't work.

encouraged to rb but fatphobes will just be blocked.

holyfoal-moved-deactivated20230

“middle aged women shouldn’t participate in fandom” and you think it’s teenagers that are writing those brilliant, incisive 100k fics of your favourite characters

herotovillain

Louder.

headspacedad

or who write the shows/movies/books your fandoms are based on

beardedmrbean

There is a line

Where things start to get really really creepy and weird.

dduane

Oh indeed?

Don’t imagine that the likes of you get to tell us where that line is, youngling. Or attempt to cite the Old Fandom Magic to us. We were there when it was written. In fact, some of us wrote it.

…Let’s stay inside the 20th century for the moment (though it would be possible to take this further back). I come of the generation of fans who invented media fandom. I remember the laboriously printed fanzines piled up on convention dealers’ tables (and the fanzines that were kept out of sight under those tables… the source of the descriptor “slash”). I remember the letter campaign that first saved Star Trek. (And am proud to say that Bjo and John Trimble were fandom-neighbors of mine.)

I remember the great New York Trek conventions where the power of that fandom first began to reveal itself: the conventions where big center-city hotels got so oversubscribed that the fire marshals had to intervene. I remember the legendary Trek con at the Commodore Hotel in Manhattan where the ladies who normally worked a nearby brothel bought memberships and started working convention registration because they saw us having so much fun with our fandom. I was twenty feet away when Bill Shatner got hit with that pie during his GoH speech (and I know who paid for it to happen). I was there the time a guy dressed as the Starship Enterprise and another one dressed as a Klingon battle cruiser got into a (staged) fistfight during a costume competition and fell off the runway onto the guests.

I was at the Sunday morning con-committee breakfast when somebody came up with a note Nichelle Nichols had pushed under the con suite door (while plastered, she later told us), asking for champagne and eggs Benedict for breakfast. I saw the distraught expressions among the concom—and some other guests: seriously, what was Fred Pohl doing there?—since unfortunately there was no room service in the hotel on Sunday. And then, among the groans, heard the unexpected response (since the first McDonald’s in Manhattan had just opened across the road): “I know. Let’s get her an Egg McMuffin and a Colt 45.”*

But under all this light-hearted stuff lay a lot of hard work and commitment to sharing the fun with others. With my contemporaries, a majority of whom were female, I watched the fandom we’d built start to grow and thrive and spread to other shows, other media, building on the blueprints we’d drawn. I watched other Trek fans turn into professional writers and editors and even a few showrunners (some of them even writing for Trek, which gave a lot of us the chuckles). I’ve seen mass-media fandom as a whole become a worldwide phenomenon, now taken for granted everywhere, and treated like something that’s always existed. Except—before us—it didn’t.

More to the point: the ever-increasing attendance at such public events, and then the sheer size and undiminished drive of online fandom when it finally got started, had the effect of emboldening the studios that would eventually start making even more shows that would leverage the power of that fandom, and the advertisers who would indirectly help pay for them. Meanwhile, the fellowship built among fans of all ages during that growth has remained, and it too has grown and spread.

So my coevals and I assert the inalienable right to keep on being part of what we helped make. We’re in our fifties and sixties and even sometimes our seventies, now, this founder-generation of fans and its immediate descendants. We built this superstructure of passion. We continue to participate in it because we’ve made lifelong friendships in it, and because we haven’t stopped finding enjoyment in the characters and media we came to love as younger people. We welcome the influx of new fans (in their twenties, or thirties, or forties, or whatever) into old fandoms… as long as they don’t start acting like they think they have the right to dictate who else will be there, on the basis of some utterly specious premise like being “too old” to have “Young People Fun” any more.

Youth is not about how many years you’ve been on the planet. Joy is not about being young. If you honestly think it is, you’d better find out who lied to you, and get yourselves sorted out—before a horrible dry joyless age of, like thirty or forty, descends upon you, and you find yourself stuck in it forever, trapped in your own ageism with no way out.

Meanwhile, if you imagine we’re going to be run off a whole half-century old way of life by a crowd of humorless, self-important, overentitled babes in arms who think people (especially women over twenty) shouldn’t be allowed to continue having whatever kind of fun they choose to in their (soi-disant) “old age”…?

Think again. We’re not going anywhere. And as for you, with your pouting and whining that we should go home and make our spouses sandwiches or something, and abandon what we founded?

Not gonna happen.

Make no mistake. We’re not locked in here with you. You’re locked in here with us. Don’t like it? (points) The fire escape doors are thataway, leading into other platforms you may find less threatening. As for us, we’re keeping this one. (We’ve just barely got the decorating the way we want it…!) Here we will stay and continue to celebrate the fandoms we love. We have a right to exist, and to be part of the phenomena we helped create. We’ll welcome you as you grow up enough to appreciate it.

…Assuming you can.

*…Which she loved, BTW. She’d forgotten about the note and was delighted to find that someone had brought her any breakfast at all.

lt-cmdr-titties

speaking of hundreds of thousands of words done by fans, the previous rb is by diane duane, who wrote ten star trek books and worked on the next generation. the fandom olds built these fandom spaces, gave fandom the power it has today. have some respect

muchymozzarella

Also just like. Citing Twilight moms as though Kpop stans and other band and YouTuber fangirls don’t exist and wild teen fans all over haven’t been unimaginably horrible and creepy as fans is very funny. Yes there are horrible rabid fangirls with no sense of boundaries. They’re all bad no matter the age range. Whereas most fandoms could not exist nor thrive if not for the 30-80 year old fans keeping them going.

pansexualpasta

Always always always rb

laurashapiro-noreally

I love my people

batsarebetterthanpeople

Not to keep harping on this but I accidentally saw a post that pissed me off a little bit so I’m gonna talk about it. Originally I was gonna put this at the end of the post but I’ve decided to move it to the top because I know some people are determined to take me out of context so I’ll sacrifice the formatting of this post and some of the impact of this sentence in a vain hope that my point will not be misconstrued. I fully anticipate people skipping over this first paragraph anyway but at least I did my due diligence. You can like Izzy, I like Lestat (AMC IWTV), I like the Joker, It’s fine to have an evil blorbo. It’s the apologia that gets me tho. You’re fake villain fuckers and you can’t admit that your blorbo is fucked up in some deeply uncomfortable ways.

That said on to my angry meta: Either Izzy is homophobic, or he’s an abuser. He could be both, but he can’t be neither otherwise the literal climax of the first season doesn’t make any fucking sense. Like he calls in a swat on Stede and the crew because Stede has, quote, “done something to his boss’s brain” and he wants Stede dead because of it. homosexuality as a corrupting influence is textbook homophobia. He thinks Stede has made Ed soft and he thinks he’s using his limp wristed wiles to do it.

If you don’t want to read it as homophobia (which would be a weird reading because it fails to explain that line and misses the whole message about toxic masculinity, but I’ve heard it’s the reading that some people go with so, let’s look at it) and you think that he’s doing all of this because he’s in love with Ed and he’s jealous, I hate to tell you but that brings us back around to the abuser reading.

Like, the reading that this subset of the fandom seems to want me to believe is Izzy is in tragic gay love with Ed. But that doesn’t make a single damn thing that he did ok. In fact it kind of makes it worse. Like trying to kill the loved ones of your beloved is text book abuser behavior. You’re telling me that Izzy feels so entitled to Ed that he cannot take “Fuck off you’re banished from the ship” For an answer, and he has to kill the guy that he blames for turning Ed against him? And I’m supposed to sympathize with that? Get real. That’s text book abuser behavior. If that’s the reading, then Izzy can’t handle Ed having someone in his life that isn’t Izzy, he can’t handle Ed making decisions that Izzy doesn’t approve of, and he can’t handle Ed breaking off their relationship (which was Izzy’s fault by the way he agreed to duel Stede sorry you can’t handle the consequences honey). Those first two things you have to be able to handle if you want to have friends or even professional relationships, and the third thing is something that you’re allowed to be upset about but that you’re gonna have to move on from. Instead Izzy comes up with a hair brained scheme that risks the crews lives, Calico Jack’s life, and, most importantly, risks Ed’s life in order to… what? Undermine Ed’s own autonomous choice to pursue a relationship with Stede? Get rid of a guy that he thinks is driving him and Ed apart so that Ed will maybe take him back? That’s abuser shit my guy.

If there’s another explanation for Izzy calling the fucking cops I’d love to hear it but as far as I can tell the options are “He hates Stede because Stede is frilly and camp and thinks Stede is making Ed weak” aka Textbook hate crime and “He’s in deeply dysfunctional love and is therefore trying to force Ed to be in a relationship with him despite the fact that Ed has made it clear he doesn’t want that” aka Textbook abuser.

To be clear I wouldn’t have Izzy any other way. The roll he plays in the narrative is important to the story. I don’t like him, per se, but I like stories about overcoming toxic masculinity, and those stories have to have a villain, and I was deeply emotionally ruined by the consequences of his actions, (i.e. the domino effect that caused Stede to abandon Ed on the dock) so I want him around for as long as they decide to keep him around. Just, like, fucking pretending he’s never done anything wrong ever? Come on now.

batsarebetterthanpeople

[Deeeep sigh] Damn i thought people with takes this idiotic all already had me blocked. I’m gonna take this shit point by point with screen caps just so I have it all in one place.

So point number one. Stede isn’t camp/feminine for the time. In isolation completely devoid of context this statement isn’t technically wrong. Men in the 1700s did dress Like That. Unfortunately for you there is context that makes this statement dumb as fuck. That context is the fact that Stede is dressed like that in this show. This show is not historically accurate. I think we can all agree to that. Ed is dressed like Mad Max. The show encourages you to forget all prior knowledge. additionally in the text of the show Stede is continuously over and over again treated as if he is not conforming to gender roles. If Stede was the “Height of Masculinity” as you claim lines like this wouldn’t make any fucking sense.

Additionally all the men do dress darker than Stede, Stede wears brighter colors, generally than the other men in Barbados that we see. And thirdly, as Badminton himself so eloquently points out. Clothing is not the end all be all of gender nonconformity.

Soft, weak, cries all the time, picks flowers. Ever heard of boys don’t cry.

Onto the second point. This is the Izzy stan behavior that I hate the most actually. It’s applying the traits of other characters to Izzy. Don’t you fucking put my boy Jack in your mouth. Izzy never said anything to imply that he thinks Stede unfairly bought his way in. Not once in the whole show does Izzy ever give Stede shit for being rich. You know who says that Stede is a store bought pirate? Calico Jack. That’s Calico Jack’s thing you’re not gonna take that from him and give it to Izzy on my post. Thank you.

Next. Toxic masculinity and homophobia are so intertwined that you cannot tease them apart. Homophobia and toxic masculinity are both fundamentally about hating you for doing your gender wrong. Anyway, Izzy Hands Homophobia compilation found here. I’m not gonna grant this, dumbest of all possible arguments, any more credence than that. Moving on.

I’m gonna save your Ed and Izzy relationship argument for last so stay tuned.

Ok, so I’m fucking laughing my ass off about you referring to Badminton as “One Dirty cop acting outside of the crown to fuck up Stede.” and THEN encouraging people to watch the show. That is the funniest shit I’ve heard anyone say to date. Anyway leaving this here for completely unrelated reasons.

(I tried to get tumblr to let me add that video to the post but I’m not tech savvy enough to make it work because this is not a functioning website and the legacy editor makes me want to chew glass. For anyone who can’t go to twitter for whatever reason, it’s the scene where the literal King of England tells Badminton that the full force of the English navy is at his disposal.)

Anyway. Onto the idea that he doesn’t put Jack or Ed’s life in danger. Jack literally got hit by a canon ball, Ed literally signed an act of grace. Izzy’s contingency plan was the dumbest contingency plan in the history of contingency plans and it’s down to Jack’s insane dick game that it almost worked. He truly put two of the most famous and successful pirates alive in a dinghy in blind mans cove with the task of escaping three British war ships. Both of those motherfuckers should have died.

Anyway. Now onto Ed and Izzy’s relationship. Yeah Ed did request that Izzy stay when Izzy wanted to leave. And yeah he was a little bit manipulative with it. Ed might have institutional power over Izzy but Izzy has emotional power over Ed, otherwise Ed would not have asked Izzy to stay. Another way that Izzy has power over Ed is that he could literally rat Ed out to the British Navy again at any fucking moment, and he’s proven that he’s willing to fucking do it. Izzy knew he didn’t have power over Ed so he literally went out of his way to get some, and he succeeded. He’s at a disadvantage, he knows it, he uses underhanded tactics to even the playing field so that he can successfully engage in abusive behaviors rather than letting the relationship die when it should have.

Now that we’ve established that. Lets move onto your weird fucking mutual abuse assertion. Izzy is the aggressor literally 100% of the time. The three times that Ed does anything to Izzy, he punched Izzy who literally tried to kill his boyfriend and is actively gaslighting him about it. He choked Izzy after Izzy dehumanized him, undermined him, and said that he should have let him die, and was intentionally emotionally provoking him to try to get him to do violence and be Blackbeard again, so you know, Izzy got what he wanted frankly, and the third time he had to put his foot down about the guy who literally threatened his life, and he did it in frankly the least deadly way possible considering that what Izzy said is grounds for a keelhauling.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. His options there were Kill Izzy, what he did, or nothing, which would have been suicide, and he’s not gonna do that, so.

Also, fucking, are you arguing that calling in a swat on the guy you’re allegedly in love with isn’t an abuser move? Rethink that take, please.

Anyway I have this person blocked. I wasn’t gonna but they really tried to tell me that yelling “Bitch” in a flamboyantly gay man’s face isn’t homophobia. That’s my line in the sand actually. Learn to identify homophobia if you want to have a serious conversation about it. You look like a clown.

ourflagmeansgayrights

claiming that ed is leveraging the fact that izzy is in love with him is a HUGE fucking reach, too. y'all can headcanon whatever you want but there is zero proof that ed knows izzy is in love with him. you can’t claim that “ed uses izzy’s feelings for him to get him to stay” as if that’s an objective truth when we don’t even know if ed fucking knows.

batsarebetterthanpeople

Oh I forgot to add two things. The first one was added by my mutual here and the second one is that. Before you bring up the French to point out that there are fruitier straight guys than Stede. The joke about the French being fruity is the oldest joke in the fucking book. Go listen to gay or European from legally blonde and maybe you’ll calm down.

ourflagmeansgayrights

also stede isn’t french and he didn’t grow up in a french colony. bridgetown was a british colony. look at how the badmintons or jeffrey or doug or any of the other white guys in barbados are dressed. dull colors, very square coats, outfits that aren’t form-fitting. that’s the standard stede was measured up to his whole life. stede’s colorful outfits are not in line with the standard of masculinity that’s expected of him

epersonae

I reblogged @chocolatepot’s post as sort of a quiet reference to this thread, but let me be more direct and link it in line:

One thing I tend to see really disparate takes on is how much of Stede's presentation is masculine or feminine, and I keep thinking about it

And DO read through to the part two! The costuming choices are so important to the themes and motifs, and giving Stede flamboyant looks both in relationship to actual historical style and in relationship to his peers, and that he dresses like that most when he is away from the life that he experiences as stifling? SO IMPORTANT.

chocolatepot

I keep meaning to go back and re-reblog my post(s), so thank you for linking it!

I mention in one or the other that I’m not comparing Stede to the party boat men because they’re “basically clowns”, but I did notice on my last watch-through (my sixteenth, if you were wondering) that while they do have the wigs and thick cosmetics that are stereotypical of 18th century buffoons on film, their actual clothes are pretty plain and boringly colored.

You’ve got some turquoises and whatnot in there, but both Ed’s and Stede’s outfits are head and shoulders above them in terms of fit, color, details, embellishments, etc.

Stede even has FLOWERS IN HIS WIG to go with Ed’s hair flowers and beard bows, which none of the men there are wearing. Obviously some of the reason for them to have generally better outfits is that they’re the leads, but the bright/light colors, visible patterns, and close fits (particularly Stede’s, which is also a product of the lack of fabric they had to make the coat, but …) marks them out as more flamboyant and queer even in a crowd of clowns.

dan-mcneely-deactivated20210328

going thru phone pics and found this thing that was tacked up next to the toaster at my old job, if anyone needs some light toast eating reading material

selfcarepropaganda

Would anyone be kind enough to transcribe this or link to a text version?

anxiety-depression-recovery

Everything Is AWFUL and I’m Not Okay: Questions to Ask Before Giving Up on Yourself

Are you hydrated?

If not, have a glass of water. Dehydration can mimic or increase feelings associated with anxiety and a well hydrated brain functions optimally. Avoid excess caffeine.

Have you eaten in the past three hours?

Don’t be a victim of hanger! Get some food–something with protein, not just simple carbs or high-fat. Nuts, hummus, and veggies are great options to feed your studying brain. Keep healthy snacks within reach to avoid mindlessly chowing down on sweets.

Have you stretched your legs in the past day?

If not, do so right now. If you don’t have the energy or time for a run or a trip to the gym, just walk around the block or building. Even minimal exercise preps the mind for learning so that you can focus better and recall things easier, plus it’s good to get a change of scenery.

Have you said something nice to someone in the past day?

Do so, whether online or in person. Make it genuine! We bet your study partner would appreciate a compliment.

Have you moved your body to music in the past day?

If not, jog for the length of a song at your favorite tempo, or just dance around your bedroom for the length of an upbeat song (singing along is a bonus)

Have you cuddled a living being in the past two days?

If not, do so. Don’t be afraid to ask for hugs from friends of friends’ pets. Most of them will enjoy the cuddles too; you’re not imposing.

Have you started or changed any medications in the past couple of weeks, including skipped doses or a change in generic prescription brand?

That may be screwing with your head. Give things a few days, then talk to your doctor if it doesn’t settle down.

If daytime: are you dressed?

If no, put on clean clothes that aren’t PJs. Give yourself permission to wear something special, whether it’s a funny t-shirt or a pretty dress.

If nighttime: are you sleepy and fatigued but resisting going to sleep?

Put on PJs, make yourself cozy in bed with a teddy bear and the sound of falling rain, and close your eyes for fifteen minutes while focusing on breathing deeper with every breath- no electronic screens allowed! Adequate sleep is a necessity for stress management.

Do you feel ineffective?

Pause right now and get something small completed, whether it’s responding to an email, loading the dishwasher, or tidying up your room. Good job!

Do you feel unattractive?

Take a darn selfie. Your friends will remind you how great you look. You are always insta-worthy.

Do you feel paralyzed by indecision?

Give yourself ten minutes to sit back and figure out a game plan for the day. If a particular decision or problem is still being a roadblock, simply set it aside for now, and pick something else that seems doable. Right now, the important part is to break through that stasis, even if it means doing something trivial.

Have you over-exerted yourself lately–physically, emotionally, socially, or intellectually?

That can take a toll that lingers for days. Give yourself a break in that area, whether it’s physical rest, taking some time alone, or relaxing with some silly entertainment for a little. Time spent refreshing yourself is never time “wasted!”

Have you waited a week?

Sometimes or perception of life is skewed, and we can’t even tell that we’re not thinking clearly, and there’s no obvious external cause. It happens. Keep yourself going for a full week, whatever it takes, and see if you still feel the same way then.

You’ve made it this far; and you will make it through. You are stronger than you think.

ain-t-bovvered

Because someone might need this today

strengthins0lidarity

You have survived 100% of your worst days.

This too shall pass.

And now we have to wait until April 2023 🥲😍♥️

#our flag means death #ofmd #gay pirates #queer pirates #rhys darby

sunfell

Pete and Repeat

trekheritageposts

star trek heritage post (April 25th, 2013)

mojoflower

So You Want to Tumbl?

There are lots of newcomers here these days, and I thought I’d spell out how to begin and what it means to ‘curate your own dash’ for folks who haven’t grown along with Tumblr for the past decade.

If you’re coming from a platform where content is fed to you, Tumblr can seem barren and intimidating in the beginning. But that’s actually a good thing! What it means is that you will see what you want to. If you’re in a fighting mood, go find political discourse. If you’re feeling fragile, make your dash nothing but art and nature.

How to begin?

You’ve made your blog and picked out your icon (seriously, choose an icon: otherwise you’re indistinguishable from bots). Feel free to be anonymous. Most of us are, and it’s wonderful to have a place that’s not tied to your Real Life. Here you can be a fandom freak (like me!) and no one judges you and your boss will never find out.

Now seek out tags that interest you. For example, I was just looking through #moss because I like peace and green things and old-growth forests. (And, apparently, beautifully naked fae-men, heh.)

Now you follow that tag (if it’s a popular tag, it’ll say how many followers the tag has, which is beneficial to know if you’re making a post that you want to reach all its interested audience) and posts with that tag automatically fill your dash. Voila, you have begun to curate your experience!

Do Follow: tags; blogs in that tag that you like; people who comment on posts in the blog/tag you follow that seem like they’re up your alley. The more people you follow, the more varied and nuanced your dash is.

Don’t Follow: people who make comments or posts that raise your blood pressure. Topics that upset you. Discourse that has you arguing in your head for the rest of the day. PLEASE avoid toxicity. Real Life is hard enough.

How to be Social and Interact

If you want to find your tribe and interact, it’s best to start following individual blogs. (If you follow a blog, they have an opportunity to follow you back. Simply following a tag is a passive, one-way street.) To Tumbl is to be in a vast cocktail party, and you need to mingle and eavesdrop to find the things that galvanize you.

How to be seen and heard

💬Comment on posts (please always stay positive and enthusiastic: we really try to avoid toxicity). You can read other comments (and reblogged comments) by clicking on the notes:

🔁Reblog posts you like, both to show your support and to show other people what kind of things get you excited. Reblogging is essential to the tumblr ecosystem, because it’s the only way posts move around and get seen. You can also “like” posts, but that’s a much more passive way to interact. Also, reblogs and your own original posts show up on your blog and prove that you’re not a bot.

Create your own posts and remember that the first 5 tags you use are essential, because that’s what gets you seen (and followed) by strangers. Tags 6-30 are good for searching and archiving on your own blog, but they don’t count on the dash. Instructions on how to Make A Post.

Participate! Once you find your crowd, you’ll discover that there are always things going on. For example, in fandoms, we’ve got writing events, art events, crafting and cons. The more you try to be involved, the more new friends you’ll discover. Tumblr allows for such an organic community. One person has a thought, and many others build on that thought, creating something far greater than the sum of its parts.

There is no real algorithm beyond using those first 5 tags. This may be discouraging to folks who are used to working an algorithm, but we like it fine here, because it keeps everyone real and keeps obnoxious social climbers/capitalists out of your face.

Be patient! Just like in real life, when you find yourself in a crowd of people you don’t know, it takes a while to form connections. Watch and listen, and learn to read the room. Honestly, the thing that will win you the most friends/followers is honest enthusiasm about your space.

Don’t aim for the big names to become your new buddies. You’re more likely to find a thriving coterie among other fresh faces. Don’t assume that because they’re small or new they have nothing to offer you. Often, this is the fire that keeps any given corner of Tumblr going.

Tumblr Etiquette

NEVER REPOST (without explicit permission). Reposting is when you cut and paste from someone else’s content and then make it into a brand new post under your own blog name. That is stealing and is very condemned. Reblogging is when you use 🔁and the OP (original poster) remains attached to their post and continues to see and be in charge of interactions.

Reblog in addition to Liking. A post that you ‘like’ is static. You are not helping it to get to a broader audience. If the post or poster is something/someone you support, then REBLOG that sucker: it deserves to fly!

Reblog and add your own content. One of the best parts of Tumblr is that you can comment on a post, or even add to it in your reblog (as long as you’re not being a dick, okay? Or changing the topic, which is known as ‘hijacking a post’). Here is a wonderful example of the Tumblr ecosystem at work, where someone had a thought, other people had thoughts about that thought, and then a bunch of artists jumped in. Tumblr posts BUILD COMMUNITY, and you can be a part of that conversation. (Do try to refrain from reblogging with vacuous comments just because you want people to notice you rather than because you actually have something to add, though. That’s just clutter.)

The most important part of “curating your experience” is learning to Block.

You can block individual blogs, Anons, people in the comments that you find upsetting. Here’s a post on How to Block.

Block entire tags or keywords if they are triggers for you. (Here is a post on how to do that.)

Blocking is self-care. It is not a platform to demonstrate to the community how much you hate someone and how they should, too. Usually the blocked person never even knows you’ve blocked them. If they do something egregious (like tell you or someone else to kill themselves), then ‘Report’ them.

You can block something (like #US Politics) if you can’t handle it at the moment, and then unblock it later. Block a friend if they’re spamming something you don’t like and then unblock them later. It’s all good! You are in control of what shows up on your dash.

But doesn’t this mean my dash will be single-topic and boring?

The simultaneous joy and pitfall in following individuals is that MANY blogs are not single-topic. You will be exposed to all kinds of reblogs/ideas/other people from the folks you chose to follow, and can decide for yourself if you (a) want to be involved in that topic, (b) are indifferent to that topic, or © want to run from it screaming.

Also, the blogs you follow will move from hobby/theme/passion over time, and you can move with them, appreciate their new topic without vibing with it, or drop them altogether.

And THIS is how you curate your dash, my friends.

***Install New XKit extension. It’ll make your life easier!

***Here’s the Tumblr Help Center, where you can learn more details.