#this...what it is between us....never changes

[balfeys]

HOW IT STARTED VS HOW IT’S GOING: JAMIE + CLAIRE EDITION(101 vs 605)

[braceletofteeth]

1x01 | 1x07

[bogkeep]

i think my best advice to anyone questioning their gender or transness is to focus a lot less on what Makes you a specific gender and focus a lot more on what you Want.

i know that's a lot easier said than done! while it is very useful to deconstruct the concept of gender and come to the conclusion that there is no set of rules to follow in any direction - that's not a very good compass for your own identity. it's maddening, i know, it would be so easy if traits X, Y and Z = The Gender, but that way of thinking is a trap that'll only cause you even more grief in the long run. trying to define gender is like trying to define art. you can certainly try, but it's either gonna be vague or it's gonna be inaccurate.

another trap that's extremely easy to fall into is the idea that you are some kind of important representation in a story narrative, and it would be Bad Representation if you were a different gender, or worse yet, chose to be a different gender. but you are not a character in a tv show! you are a real person that's alive! you are not failing feminism if you'd rather be a man than a woman, or if you'd rather be a conventionally feminine woman rather than a subversive feminine man, or if you'd rather drop having a gender entirely instead of being gender-nonconforming cis/binary person, et cetera. there are so many people in this world, it doesn't rely on You Specifically being the hero of feminism that carries all of womanhood or gender subversion on your shoulders. there's plenty of gender diverse people to go around. there's not a shortage!!

trying to isolate gender desires into What You Want can be pretty difficult when the world is so scary, or if you're a kind of person who hasn't gotten to practice Wanting Things very much, or if it's tangled up with other junk like body dysmorphia or trauma or shame. i don't have any good tricks for solving any of those problems, sorry. i just wanted to say that a good first step about identifying what you Might Want is to do a thought experiment where you remove all the scary obstacles. if there were no consequences, if it was super easy, if all you needed to do was snap your fingers to change the material world, would you Want to be a boy? a girl? neither? both? secret third option? would you want to look super fem but be perceived as a man? or the other way around? would you want everyone to forget the gender binary exists when they see you? would you want your body to be different? would you want everyone to know you by a different name? what would you change if it were easy?

[endermagpieart]

Decided to go through my more recent fanart and post some of the ones I like even after they’ve sat for so long! They go from newest to oldest which I think the way I draw Tenna shows lol.

Most of these were on canvases with other sketches so I just screenshotted them which may affect the quality? I dunno I don’t care too much anyways I’m just trying to get myself used to posting unfinished/basic drawing tbh

[yelyahrodrigo]

alright one thing I'm not gonna do is tolerate Taylor Benjamin York slander okay that man is the Patron Saint of Paramore and we forever support him in this household

we have no idea what happened but it's clearly Not a Good Time for either of them so I think they both deserve grace and might I add AGAIN that T was genuinely the only thing holding Paramore together during the dark years so if I see one more "fan" talking shit on MR. PARAMORE.....just remember to thank him on your way out the door 👋🏼👋🏼👋🏼

[family-discord-server]

You know what? I will die on the hill that Stratt is Gandalf actually.

She knew who could handle it, she knew how unlikely it was to work, she knew how many worse options there were. Gandalf chose Frodo. She chose Grace.

What did Gandalf have that Stratt didn’t?

Time.

[dramashutup]

This is one of my comfort shows now 🥹 they're so precious to me

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

I'm not gonna do this on the post in question because A) I don't want to do OP dirty like that, and B) I don't really think this specific post is wrong perse, more I feel it is absent a piece of context that many non-smokers understandably lack, and that's not actually a crime even where it's annoying.

There's a tendency to act like vaping exploded in popularity because smokers are easily tricked and attracted by fun flavors and that thoughtlessness or absence of critical thinking is part of the vaping culture, and like. I - an active smoker in varying capacities for going on 6years now - have similar criticisms of the relationship a lot of vaping-exclusive smokers relate to smoking etiquettes, as well as about the role of flavored vapes in easing the path to entry on smoking for many who might have been able to resist if the taste remained foul.

But I also know the truth about how smoking starts, and even when it IS a stupid kid walking into a corner smokeshop and impulse buying an orange cream soda flavored vape, it still isn't about that.

It's about stress.

When people say smoking is used to self-medicate, what that means is that many smokers, whether or nicotine, Marijuana, or any other medicinal/recreational inhalant, experience noticeable and prompt emotional and stress modulation during and after a smoke. There are natural outcomes of inhaling anything, good, bad, and neutral, and for many people, a reliable, consistent, and prompt access to an emotional/stress regulator is a HUGE piece of infrastructure in life.

We know, based on now decades of research, that stress rates are measureably and significantly predictive of most forms of smoking, and it would be reasonable to conclude that as people, including and especially socially disempowered people like minors, those under conservatorship, marginalized and oppressed affinity-based communities, etc, become more stressed and have fewer ways of entering "rest and digest", that their bodies more and more compulsively seek out the reliable, short-term solution that meets the function of "provide/facilitate a brief period of destress/decompression" that smoking often has for folks.

And like. Even if you're not a smoker, I think most of us can understand how that relationship can quickly become one with much bigger problems, but when you're not a smoker, it can be easy to start othering the reasonable nature of this mechanism in creating what we call addiction. The increasing restrictiveness of one's ability to actually successfully and on purpose relax for a minute and breathe and take space from the hardships of life is not unique to smoking, and I'm sure we've all experienced that compulsive seeking of self-soothing when everything has been too much for too long and we feel that nothing else is working any more. It's the most human behavior in the world to seek embodied peace and security in amongst fear and chaos.

So I want you to think about the timelines of increases in teen smoking or in vaping rates. I want you to REALLY think about what society tends to look like just before we start getting lots of increasing scrutiny of smoking rate increases. I want you to consider the following:

1) what systemic and individual stressors might be increasing pressure and strain on people at those times?

And

2) what losses in access to third spaces, community, support/public health infrastructure, or other constrictions of need-meeting are occurring at this time that might drive people to compulsive seek "quick fix" decompression aids, including smoking?

And just to illustrate this point, lets take a quick look at the rates of teen smoking over the last few decades:

Trends in Cigarette Smoking Among United States Adolescents

Background: Cigarette smoking remains the leading avoidable cause of premature death in the United States, accounting for approximately 500,

So lets mark a few clear increases and trends here, keeping in mind that many factors will have been involved but we're observing themes.

We see increases from about 1990 to 2000 and about 2003-2005, but otherwise we mostly see decreases. Additionally, we consistently see that smoking amongst the 16-21 crowd is higher than the >16 yr old crowd, and this is what we call "transitional age youth" where they are in the process of shifting between the disempowered role of minor and the empowered role of adult, with all the tensions and complications of figuring out how to make that work for them. Transitions like this are known stressors even without any additional time-specific environmental context because of how many societies interact with the coming of age process and how humans respond to change and "change under duress".

But lets look at some historical timelines around this:

-USA military action in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as a growing nationalism and constriction of freedom in third spaces as part of security theater were key factors in the socio-political environment of teens in the early 2000s, with 2003-2005 being big years for military recruitment, conversations about the re-enstatement of the draft, as well as years of rapidly escalating military and state violence related to USA actions within and beyond the original sites of violence and conflict

- in Sudan and the Congo, 2003 was a marker of significant upticks in violence during civil war and unrest in the region, including the initiation of many different organizations, militias, and other political entities participating in the violence and de-/re-stabilization efforts

- Nigeria also experienced difficult regime challenges/changes that intensified during this time, as did the Yemeni people as they sought to navigate a complicated governmental re-stabilization after a period of European decolonialism, a common outcome of wrecking-ball style withdrawals that Imperial powers are known for in response to calls for decolonial action.

-2003 also included a SARS epidemic that briefly threatened to reach Pandemic status, and included major concerns about West Nile Virus and its seasonal surges in temperate agricultural regions as well as possible implications on food distribution

- the west bank barrier's construction became increasingly concerning to international aid organizations and requests were made to assess its impact on Palestinian survival need-meeting (the impact was, as expected at the time, dire)

- genocidal violence in Kashmir experienced several major surges around this time

- global warming's early impacts on natural disaster and international awareness was a major topic of conversation and conversations around climate grief trace back to this period

Ultimately these are all tiny slices of the world, and my point here is less "I think upheaval and violence causes smoking" and more "I think as the world becomes more stressful/scary and people have fewer options for feeling safe and secure in their day to day lives, the siren call of the smoke break becomes a little harder to resist"

I dunno, I think it's easy to treat the people around you who make choices you wouldn't or that you don't understand as if they are irrational beings doing stupid shit for no reason. But when we do that, it tends to make it VERY easy to overlook how often people "do stupid shit" for very understandable reasons that often have nothing to do with them and everything to do with how they're treated in the world. And unfortunately when we start thinking someone is irrational, we often start treating them like they have no right to their decisions [because we do not understand or agree with them and this is proof of irrationality/immaturity/a lack of pro-social reasoning and values to many which is in turn evidence that one need not consider a person fully human and autonomous and may override their decisions]. And when we do THAT we often find ourselves justifying some truly fucked up behaviors against people whose only crime was already being disempowered before we encountered them and acting within their disempowerment on their own terms. We might consider that disempowered people are often making the best choices they can with the resources they have at the time and likely very few if any of their available choices are actually GOOD [lesser of the evils logic] and we can all understand why that might happen in the moment, but we often struggle with how to contextualize what it means that this is both understandable and has deeply troublesome consequences.

TLDR: Consider that there might be a socio-political motive to view smokers as irrational, ungoverned savages who ruin public spaces for everyone else simply by existing in them as themselves, and thus they must be rigidly policed and regulated "into compliance" because they don't know well enough not to do something self-soothing that has the potential to harm them or someone else [aka literally everything ever] with and without proper risk management.