Well... It could have been worse.

Sophie, 21. I like cheesecake, coffee, and singing in my car. Really into Marvel, and various TV shows. 

[still-sophistory]

PRODUCER: THAT GUY YOU LOVE TO MAKE FISTSHAKE.GIFS ABOUT

STARRING: A MODERATELY ATTRACTIVE WHITE ACTOR, ANOTHER MODERATELY ATTRACTIVE WHITE ACTOR, AND SOME BACKGROUND LADIES I GUESS

SYNOPSIS: WHO GIVES A FUCK

[still-sophistory]

fandom’s new favourite show you guys, txt it

[dracula61]

[ashstatic]

check out her page, it is so cool. this is the link to this specific video: deville.design

[jeanjauthor]

Okay, you gotta understand 1 more layer of just how awesome this is. That's an old-fashioned calligraphy pen. Yes, with a very fine point, and it's clearly a cartridge pen since it's not having to be dipped in an inkpot periodically, but it uses an ink that cannot be erased, and will smear like hell if it isn't handled carefully.

There is not a single mistake on this entire page.

There is not a single hesitation.

There is only the artistry of pure confidence.

This is the result of, not thousands of strokes of practice, but well beyond ten thousand strokes of practice, and quite possibly more than a hundred thousand strokes of practice.

Practice does indeed make perfect.

May your own art, your own creativity, reach these kinds of heights, whatever it is...and may you always have the passion & interest to continue practicing.

[importantcatpics]

[redstonedust]

welcome to my epic fantasy world. we have many developed fantasy kingdoms with 2000 years of rich lore and history. and to the south you can see the evil sand people and to the east theres japanchina.

[victusinveritas]

[liminalweirdo]

i'm not sure why this was posted without the link to the actual GFM but here it is

[narcissistcookbook]

i had a dream two nights ago where i was being shown around a fancy medieval port, and my guide said "this coast used to have two ports, Mangeet and Totoga, but in recent years we've combined them both into one - Port ManTo" and i actually woke up with a fucking start

[playwrongs]

there's nothing i like more as a computer program than a long period of silent contemplation - not doing anything, not rushing anywhere, just standing here and enjoying this moment with the user. oh, it seems once again he has summoned my beautiful and ruthless wife Task Manager. hello, my darling! what are you doing with that long cruel scimitar

[shinesurge]

Honestly I can tell you finding out art was made by AI really does immediately, legitimately sour it for me, like people will trot this out as a Gotcha for anti-AI people but it's just making it clear they don't consider art to be the conversation that it is lol. It's similar to the way Harry Potter immediately soured for me because engaging with it while knowing the kind of heart Rowling is writing from changes the way the work feels; there isn't any moralizing or whatever that I have to do, it's easy to drop it because it's rotted in my hands.

"Oh but you LIKED this song before, nothing changed!" The conversational partner did. A very large portion of what is interesting to me about art is thinking of why the creator chose that instrumentation, or what made them want to make the thing in the first place. Finding out I've been talking to a wall completely removes an entire third of the force that art is to me, and I can't argue that anything about art or its consumption is Objectively Correct but I can argue it's fucking boring lmao

[shinesurge]

so so psyched people are on board with this post all of a sudden but it is also having the baffling effect of prompting strangers to beam "i agree but LET ME BE CLEAR i do not give a single shit about artists as humans their work is completely static inert material to me" directly into my notifications like. y'all can just not say that to an artist you don't know, that can be an Inside Thought maybe

[sheafrotherdon]

I'm reading an article in The New Yorker about potential plagiarism in romantasy land and they talked to a number of authors to provide context. Including . . . . Cassandra Clare.

I just . . . you talked to CC in a story about alleged plagiarism in fiction? I have passed away from a terminal case of irony.

[daphrona]

Walked past a beloathed coworker that has been picking a fight with me vis a vis our lead as a middle man and he had tumblr open on his phone so Kevin if you're reading this I will start a war you will not win if you keep this shit up.

[daphrona]

You're allowed to reblog this to let Kevin know I'm not fucking around.

[mishafletcher]

Are you a Gold Star lesbian? (Just in case you don't know what it means, a Gold Star lesbian is a lesbian that has never had the sex with a guy and would never have any intentions of ever doing so)

So I got this ask a while ago, and I’ve been lowkey thinking about it ever since.

First: No. I am a queer, cranky dyke who is too old for this sort of bullshit gatekeeping. 

Second: What an unbelievable question to ask someone you don’t even know! What an incomprehensibly rude thing to ask, as if you’re somehow owed information about my sexual history. You’re not! No one—and I can’t reiterate this enough, but no one—owes you the details of their sex lives, of their trauma, or of anything about themselves that they don’t feel like sharing with you.

The clickbait mills of the internet and the purity police of social media would like nothing more than to convince everyone that you owe these things to everyone. They would like you to believe that you have to prove that you’re traumatized enough to identify with this character, that you can’t sell this article about campus rape without relating it to your own sexual assault, that you can’t talk about queer issues without offering up a comprehensive history of your own experiences, and none of those things are true. You owe people, and especially random strangers on the internet, nothing, least of all citations to somehow prove to them that you have the right to talk about your own life.

This makes some people uncomfortable, and to be clear, I think that that’s good: people who feel entitled to demand this information should be uncomfortable. Refusing to justify yourself takes power away from people who would very much like to have it, people who would like to gatekeep and dictate who is permitted to speak about what topics or like what things. You don’t have to justify yourself. You don’t have to explain that you like this ship because this one character reminds you a bit of yourself because you were traumatized in a vaguely similar way and now— You don’t have to justify your queerness by telling people about the best friend you had when you were twelve, and how you kissed, and she laughed and said it was good practice for when she would kiss boys and your stomach twisted and your mouth tasted like bile and she was the first and last girl you kissed, but— 

You don’t owe anyone these pieces of yourself. They’re yours, and you can share them or not, but if someone demands that you share, they’re probably not someone you should trust.

Third: The idea of gold star lesbians is a profoundly bi- and trans- phobic idea, often reducing gender to genitals and the long, shared history of queer women of all identities to a stark, artificial divide where some identities are seen as purer or more valuable than others. This is bullshit on all counts.

There’s a weird and largely artificial division between bisexuals and lesbians that seems to be intensifying on tumblr, and I have to say: I hate it. Bisexual women aren’t failed lesbians. They’re not somehow less good or less valid because they’re attracted to [checks notes] people. Do you think that having sex with a man somehow changes them? What are you so worried about it for? I’ve checked, and having sex with a man does not, in fact, make your vagina grow teeth or tentacles. Does that make you feel better? Why is what other people are doing so threatening to you?

Discussions of gold star lesbians are often filled with tittering about hehe penises, which is unfortunate, since I know a fair few lesbians who have penises, and even more lesbians who’ve had sex with people, men and women alike, who have penises. I’m sorry to report that “I’m disgusted by a standard-issue human body part” is neither a personality nor anything to be proud of. I’m a dyke and I don’t especially like men, but dicks are just dicks. You don’t have to be interested in them, but a lot of people have them, and it doesn’t make you less of a lesbian to have sex with someone who has a dick.

There’s so much garbage happening in the world—maybe you haven’t noticed, but things are kind of Not Great in a lot of places, and there’s a whole pandemic thing that’s been sort of a major buzzkill? How is this something that you’re worried about? Make a tea, remind yourself that other people’s genitalia and sexual history are none of your business, maybe go watch a video about a cute animal or something. 

Fourth: The idea of gold star lesbians is a shitty premise that argues that sexuality is better if it’s always been clear-cut and straightforward—but it rarely is. We live in a very, very heterosexist culture. I didn’t have a word for lesbian until many years after I knew that I was one. How can you say that you are something when your mouth can’t even make the shape of it? The person you are at 24 is different to the person you are at 14, and 34, and 74. You change. You get braver. The world gets wider. You learn to see possibilities in the shadows you used to overlook. Of course people learn more about themselves as they age.

Also, many of us, especially those of us who grew up in smaller towns, or who are over the age of, say, 25, grew up in times and places where our sexuality was literally criminal.

Shortly after I graduated high school, a gay man in my state was sentenced to six months in jail. Why? Well, he’d hit on someone, and it was a misdemeanor to “solicit homosexual or lesbian activity”, which included expressing romantic or sexual interest in someone who didn’t reciprocate. You might think, then, that I am in fact quite old, but you would be mistaken. The conviction was in 1999; it was overturned in 2002.

I grew up knowing this: the wrong thing said to the wrong person would be sufficient reason to charge me with a crime.

In the United States, the Defense of Marriage Act was passed in 1996, clarifying that according to the federal government, marriage could only ever be between one man and one woman. It also promised that even if a state were to legalize same-sex unions, other states wouldn’t have to recognize them if they didn’t want to. And wow, they super did not want to, because between 1998 and 2012, a whopping thirty states had approved some sort of amendment banning same-sex marriage.

Every queer person who’s older than about 25 watched this, knowing that this was aimed at people like them. Knowing that these votes were cast by their friends and their families and their teachers and their employers. 

Some states were worse than others. Ohio passed their bill in 2004 with 62% approval. Mississippi passed theirs the same year with 86% approval. Imagine sitting in a classroom, or at work, or in a church, or at a family dinner, and knowing that statistically, at least two out of every three people in that room felt you shouldn’t be allowed to marry someone you loved.

Matthew Shepard was tortured to death in October of 1998. For being gay, for (maybe) hitting on one of the men who had planned to merely rob him. Instead, he was tortured and left to die, tied to a barbed wire fence. His murderers were both sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison. This was controversial, because a nonzero number of people felt that Shepard had brought it upon himself.

Many of us sat at dinner tables and listened to this discussion, one that told us, over and over, that we were fundamentally wrong, fundamentally undeserving of love or sympathy or of life itself.

This is a tiny, tiny sliver of history—a staggeringly incomplete overview of what happened in the US over about ten years. Even if this tiny sliver is all that there were, looking at this, how could you blame someone for wanting to try being not Like This? How can you fault someone who had sex, maybe even had a bunch of sex, hoping desperately that maybe they could be normal enough to be loved if they just tried harder? How can you say that someone who found themself an uninteresting but inoffensive boyfriend and went on dates and had sex and said that it was fine is somehow less valuable or less queer or less of a lesbian for doing so? For many people, even now, passing as straight, as problematic as that term is, is a survival skill. How dare you imply that the things that someone did to protect themself make them worth less? They survived, and that’s worth literally everything.

Fifth, finally: What is a gold star, anyhow? You’ve capitalized it, like it’s Weighty and Important, but it’s not. Gold stars were what your most generous grade school teacher put on spelling tests that you did really well on. But ultimately, gold stars are just shiny scraps of paper. They don’t have any inherent value: I can buy a thousand of them for five bucks and have them at my door tomorrow. They have only the meaning that we give them, only the importance that we give them. We’re not children desperately scrabbling for a teacher’s approval anymore, though. We understand that good and bad are more of a spectrum than a binary, and that a gold star is a simplification. We understand that no number of gold stars will make us feel like we’re special enough or good enough or important enough, or fix the broken places we can still feel inside ourselves. Only we can do that.

The stars are only shiny scraps of paper. They offer us nothing; we don’t need them. I hope that someday, you see that, too. 

[a-for-effort-f-for-execution]

pretty sure i got anon hate for rebloging this so im going to reblog it again just for fun

[grison-in-space]

Well, I’m going to scoot right on up and come sit by you, then, because this is a+.

[urlocalllama]

Diabetes isnt the 'ate too many sweets disease'. It just fucking is not. It's your body slowly losing an integral function needed to nuture and energize it. Its your pancreas shutting down, its your blood cells rejecting your attempts to feed itself, its not enough insulin to go around. Its you slowly getting colder and weaker, gorging yourself with healthy food and getting next to no benefit, its being so exhausted you cant sleep. Diabetes used to kill, straight-up KILL. So no, I don't think I will be laughing at your diabetes joke.

[morgangalaxy43]

You want Venom The Last Dance to be rated R so Venom can eat people I want Venom The Last Dance to be rated R so Venom and Eddie can have sex we are not the same

[lifeattomsdiner]

First you procrastinate on the task because it is not a big enough deal to get done urgently. Then you procrastinate on the task because it has become such a big deal that doing it is overwhelming. You would think that this implies a middle point where it is just big enough of a deal to get done easily, however the inherent perversity of the universe's causal geometry prevents this

[threeeyedharemp3]

you came back wrong and i am racked with guilt because i cannot bear to see you like this and i should have let you rest. i loved you so much that i defied death itself but i do not think either of us are happy

[vetchtibbles]

this is what microwaving leftover pizza feels like

[threeeyedharemp3]

stop it i was trying to be gothic

[messrsage]

you wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me

[animentality]