This is more-or-less an official shutting down of this blog, to wrap things up properly, and to let people know Iâm okay and didnât fall off the actual face of the Earth. I thought maybe Iâd come wandering back at some point, but it doesnât look like itâs going to shape up that way. My interests have shifted so much and work eats up so much of my time that I just donât have the energy anymore. A day becomes a week becomes a month becomes half a year. Iâm still around in other places on the internet now, sort of, but Iâm mostly keeping to myself, and Iâm very quiet.
Thank you all for your time the last couple years. I really enjoyed talking with you all and getting to know you. Please take care of yourselves! Be well!
âWeâve always struggled with finding a quick way of communicating why #TheZoneCast is worth listening to. Hopefully, this trailer for the Balance arc does the trick. Thanks for sharing it with everyone on Earth.â
Enjoy!  And check out the list of trailer credits here! https://taztrailer.tumblr.com/post/170107763441/taz-balance-animated-trailer-credits
i was one of the Color Artists for this and I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to work alongside such talented people âšâšâš PLEASE GIVE IT A WATCH!!!!
âsweetly oblivious old ladiesâ Hon I 100% guarantee to you that those old ladies are aware of you, your bloodline, your daily habits and your breakfast order and gossip about how rude you are as soon as you leave.Â
âIf you want to eavesdrop on someone, knit or sew or some sort of womanly craft. Men will act as though you are deaf and blind even when shown evidence otherwise.â - Trickstersâ Choice.
What really slips my stitches here is how utterly and completely the narrator (and writer, most likely) fails to understand that this woman is creating clothing (or a blanket, I guess). Sheâs making something useful and heâs sitting there deriding it as busywork while doing nothing productive whatsoever.
Woman: *literally constructs a garment from yarn with such skill she doesnât have to look at what sheâs doing*
Weâre still not much older than them, I believe we can use this as encouragement to rally ourselves, too. If the kids can be this proactive and passionate, we can rise up from the prone position theyâve beaten us to and show them they havenât won. Weâre still here and we care about our future, too.
A combined force of Millennials and Gen Z will be a much MUCH larger force than the Boomers would expect, and theyâd never stand a chance.
Hereâs the thing, guys, thereâs the damn thing. Iâm seeing a lot of comments like âsorry we failed youâ and âgo do what we could notâ and so on and so forth. Itâs really disheartening talk, and I get it, beLIEVE me, I get it. But I want yâall to think for just a second about how much the beating weâve taken as a generation is playing right into the hands of the assholes who want to silence the Z kids.
We grew up on the same stories Zâers did. HP, Hunger Games, all that. We read the same stuff. We jumped out into the world ready to do anything. And the Boomers in charge immediately blind sided us. We knew the recession/depression weâd grown up in was badânow that we were adults, they shoved the burden of it off on us, they blamed it on us, and had the audacity to demand that WE fix it. The economy and world we were promised by our parents growing up wasnât there anymore. Daring to have dreams if you werenât from an already supremely privileged background was suddenly tantamount to signing your own death warrant. Now, we all just struggle to survive, burdened by lifetime debts, mental and physical illnesses we canât often afford to treat, and a crushing sense of defeat.
Not to sound like a total conspiracy nut, but that is exactly what they want.
To the Boomers in charge, we are supposed to be a lesson to all future generations of what happens when you challenge the system in anyway. We started claiming our differences (to mixed success), and they punished us for trying to openly live and love our truths. We tried to make our dreams and life goals happen, and they punished us with crippling debt for an education they no longer value. We asked for help with out struggles, and they punished us for having neurochemical imbalances, physical disabilities, for being abused and neglected and not just sucking it up but daring to want things to be different, to change for the better.
Our current state of downtrodden obeisance is what they want, and what they expected the Zâers to follow. Look at the Millennials, we have ground them down to barely scraping by, and if you donât toe the line, you will join them.
And rather than accept that, these kids are screaming up a storm and throwing down a challenge that the Boomers are scrambling to react to.
They didnât expect these kids to look at what happened to us and say âFUCK NO. You may have killed their spirit but you havenât killed ours!â And they clearly do not know what to do about it.
So where does that leave us? Well, clearly weâre all in support of these kids. But all those comments of âweâre too tired and depressed to help but goodonyaâ? If thatâs all you can muster because of your life circumstances, that is awesome and fine, but for the rest of us who are able to do a little more, we need to do more. After all, these kids are also all dealing with many of the same things weâre dealing with, like depression and anxiety and discrimination. Where do you think they started learning about that stuff from? Where do you think they got the example that they deserve better in spite of all that?
Millennials, weâre now all generally in our early/mid-20s up into 30s. That doesnât mean our protest days are over! What in the world would make you think that? Do we have the same amount of comparative free time that these Gen Z kids have? No, generally not. But they are also risking a lot here in order to have their voices heard. Itâs wrong to ask them to risk so much when we ourselves wonât risk as much. But also, how boss would it be if Millennials suddenly rose up alongside them and helped to make the changes we want to see?
Years after they think theyâve beaten us into submission, we take a solid, tangible stand alongside the Gen Z kids. We multiply the number of people speaking out and exercising our right to be heard and enact change when they think theyâve beaten the fight out of us. We do more than offer our best wishes, we offer our time and our sweat and our tears to help the Zâers accomplish these goals. Our youths are not necessarily behind us, and just because weâre adults now does not mean we have to stop fighting.
We can push back alongside them and make it clear that they didnât break us, they just made us stronger and angrier. The only lesson they taught the world by crushing us down was that the way weâve been treated is wrong, and that everyone deserves better.
What Iâm saying is, please donât buy into the idea that we Millennials are, as a generation, defeated. We are far from it. The way some of you are talking, it sounds like youâre all 80+ year old soldiers who have already fought this war. And while maybe life has smacked you around enough that it feels that way, the truth is we were benched from the war before we even had a chance to fight more than a few battles. Theyâve been keeping us so locked down in the trenches of despair that we donât even remember what the battle field looks like.
These Gen Z kids are Wonder Woman charging out of the trench and barreling across No Manâs Land when no one thought it was possible. We need to be Steve Trevor and every man in those trenches who charges out behind her to back her up. She can take care of herself, but she can always use some help. We need to be that help
Donât give in to the despair, donât give in to the Boomersâ hopes that weâre too downtrodden to help. Gen Z is paving the way. We can still stand right next to them and change the course of history.
This actually holds weight, because one thing Iâve been watching for years is how DIFFERENTLY Gen Z is treated in comparison to how we were treated. I remember being in High School and staring in alarm at my Advanced Placement class, apparently the most motivated and forward thinking students in the school, when the teacher asked us to list âpositives and negatives about our generationâ and literally the ENTIRE BOARD was a scrawl of negatives. Maybe one positive got sort of tossed on the other end for balance or something, but Iâm not kidding when I say one side of the board was too cramped to even write anything new on by the time my turn came around, and the other might as well have been the barren wasteland of a nuclear fallout zone.Â
We hate ourselves. Weâve hated ourselves since we were kids.Â
Millennials were never the promised generation, not since the first wave of us, probably. We were destroying society before any of us were even old enough to vote, remember? Iâm sure you remember the articles. We were disappointments and failures from the word go, as soon as the first of us hit the age of outspokeness and our parentsâ generation didnât like what they were hearing. Being at the tail end of the generation, I and my peers grew up saturated in the message that we--we as human beings--were poison to society.Â
And I know for a fact most of us never learned better. We were set up from childhood to self-sabotage, eat each other alive. Itâs an effective tactic. Divide and conquer. We never really recovered.Â
And I know this person has a point about us being the Example generation, because Iâve been listening to how they talk about Gen Z from the time they were little kids. They were better, smarter, more mature, the media said. They werenât going to be like those Millennials. They were determined to not be like those Millennials. This is the message Gen Z kids were given, and there is nothing a kid wants more than to be taken seriously by the adults in their life. They did it to us when they played us off each other, telling us that, oh, we arenât like those other kids, the bad Millennials, we were the exception to our entire cock-up of a generation, and theyâre doing it to the Gen Z kids by playing them off of us.Â
Youâre better than them, they say, and if you want to stay better then you need to toe the party line. You donât want to be like them, with all that societal messaging constantly detailing how youâre the downfall of society and everything wrong with the world, right, and how everything would be better if you just werenât? Thatâd be awful. Of course you donât want that. Donât you even worry your head about it, so long as you donât turn out like them.Â
They tore us down, and they built Gen Z up on the condition that they werenât like us, except now these kids arenât KIDS anymore, and instead of being the incoming storm of The Old Guard Made New society was perhaps expecting, theyâve turned right around and gone for the jugular. And they werenât designed to self-sabotage, like us, they werenât beaten down before they could even get started, like us, they werenât made to feel like they were wrong, like us. Theyâre strong, and confident, and united.
So, kudos to those kids for overcoming that conditioning. Really. Theyâre doing good things. Iâm super proud of them, and as an adult pissed as hell that theyâre having to do it, about the circumstances that put them in that position, but ready to do whatever I have to from my position in society to make sure they get to speak in as much safety as I can give them, because they have good and important things to say and if I can help them be heard by shutting down the adults who would shut them down then I will do it.Â
But at the same time, Millennials as a whole have GOT TO STOP that thing where we talk ourselves down all the damn time. Weâve been doing it our entire lives and I am sick of it.Â
Children died, and thatâs a failure of every adult in this country, yes, but it isnât specifically our failure and donât anyone dare try to cloud the issue by trying to make it about us. Donât absolve any adult of the responsibility they should feel for this. This is not a Millennial issue, this is an American issue. Is it our fault? No. Should we feel responsible as voting citizens with the right to voice our opinions to make sure the chances of it happening again are at minimum drastically reduced? Absolutely.Â
Weâre mid-twenties to thirties, we are not grizzled old war vets, for christâs sake. Weâre pulling ourselves together from the scattered, disorganized wreck our childhood under psychological siege left us. We havenât âgiven upâ because weâve only just started. Mid-twenties/early thirties is NOT OLD. Just because change didnât happen in the blink of an eye like people seemed to expect doesnât mean we failed. Major societal shift doesnât happen in a single decade peacefully, especially not when weâre trying to fight on so many different fronts. We donât want to change one thing, we want to change all things, and weâre positioning ourselves in places of power, building up the base we need to get to the places where change on the scale we want can happen because this is real life and nothing happens fast.
Sure, Gen Zâs popping up reinforcements now, itâs great to know that these kids are growing up into people also willing to fight for their rights and the rights of their neighbors, but theyâre not a guiding star come out of the darkest hour to lead us into the light, either. We were already heading there. Breaking ground is hard and unrewarding, sure, but someone has to go first to set the path, build the bridges, loosen that jar cap, make it so that when they come charging, they have the ground to do it. We do this together, because loud and proud and right or not theyâre still kids, and weâre the adults, and adults do not let children expose themselves first to the fire. We sure as fuck donât turn to them and say, âSave us.â Thatâs not their job. We have decades of time, I mean, hell, none of us even have more than one (1) (single) decade of adulthood under our belts at most. We donât have the right to throw in the towel this early and dump it all on someone else because it wasnât as easy as people convinced themselves it would be.Â
Weâre not united, weâre not proud, weâre not the storybook revolutionaries we apparently value over the unrewarding grittiness of real-life resistance, and thatâs fine. What we should be, at the very least, is the thing that hears our children dying and picks itself up out of the wreckage society buried us under very, very angry. We shouldnât be letting those children think they have to fight by themselves.Â
We never stopped fighting. We, as a whole, never stopped fighting. The fact we didnât fix the entire damn world before Gen Z came knocking doesnât mean we stopped trying.Â
And we need to stop letting ourselves be convinced that we failed because we couldnât snap our fingers and make everything right the second we all got out of High School.Â
âIf youâve a life to throw awayăŒâ, the prince had said, the shards of magic waning as he lowered his gauntleted fingers, âăŒgive it to me.â
some ableist fool who knows naught of magic: if youâre so tired, how come you can [stim/talk about special interest/scroll through tumblr]â you must be faking! you just donât want to do it
me, a master wizard: those are my cantrips you knave
