Posts about whatever’s on my mind. Introverted & adhd, so there’s a lot going on up there and no where else to put it. Looking to meet people, so feel free to message. I’m not putting my age/birthday on here because that’s private, but I’m over 18.
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
the grim reality for a lot of nonbinary people is that their options are closet themselves and be perpetually misunderstood by the world at large or be out and proud and be perpetually misunderstood by the world at large
I feel like no matter what I do someone is going to try to put me into a little box. It doesn’t matter if that box is progressive or not. It’s the same. The whole point of being genderless, for me, is that I don’t want to be forced into a mold. Yes, I’m sexually male and yes often I dress/act masculine. I might dress/act a little differently another day. Maybe a little fem, maybe a mix, maybe something else. You likely won’t see all the parts of me on any given day unless you know me well. Don’t read into any of that, don’t try to label it, just leave me be.
There are hardly any female werewolves because they break all the classic rules of femininity. They force you to confront female violence, strength, size, grotesqueness and uncontrollability. Historically female shapeshifters always shift into something dangerous (snake) or sleek (cat) or dainty (bird) but female werewolves ignore the masculine gaze completely. They're distorted beasts that have no ulterior motive except to destroy. Nothing about them is nurturing or modest. They're the opposite of what a woman "should be." Their omission from pop culture is not an accident.
It’s important to note the other side of this. How easily we consider bestial traits to be inherently masculine, or rather how we assume men are inherently beast-like somehow. In the same way women are denied the realism and freedom that would come from embodying all these werewolf traits, men are denied the freedom that would come from embodying more feminine traits. This is the same thing that happens in a lot of video games by the way, especially mmos. The males of the various species will be monsters, and the females are just traditionally attractive women with different skin colors. We’re all in tiny little boxes.
I'm just gonna slide this on in here for anyone that is interested in preserving old games. They take it very seriously too, they want an archive of every single game. Like, they have lists of every game ever released for a system, and once that system gets old enough, they add it to their archive and start collecting. Their latest addition was the Xbox 360, they opened that vault up in September 2022, and proudly announced they'd finished their collection of games for it back in April.
Also, while their game archives are almost entirely complete, they've got another project of archiving the manuals that came with those games, and that is... considerably less well filled out. Their collection of Xbox 360 manuals is especially rough, they've only gotten manuals for three games. So if you've got some Xbox 360 games kicking around, and the manual's still with them, please consider scanning them and submitting them to the site!
Game preservation is important, but people rarely consider preserving the manuals as well; I really respect Vimm's Lair for being so thorough in their archival work.
I've been using Vimm's Lair for years, I have yet to see a single bad link or virus on the entire site. It's arguably the safest and most comprehensive archive of video games in existence. Preserved history
crazy how i find myself thinking i've got a handle on it all finally and then i see the ways that other people tangle their lives together so easily and live so easily together with their friends and i feel like that girl at the top of the stairs painting by norman rockwell
I finally watched project hail mary, and I feel like it was a little over-hyped on here. Like I enjoyed it, it was a good movie. It just wasn’t a great movie. First of all, it was at least an hour too long. The lingering shots of space and ryan gosling were excessive, and it felt like there was a lot of padding. Don’t get me wrong, the space shots were absolutely beautiful. Incredible work by the artists, but too much. I had a few issues with science stuff, but I think the main reason I didn’t love the movie is that I didn’t fall in love with rocky. Their relationship was obviously the focus of the film, but to me it felt off. They set up rocky like he would be a scientific colleague, but it didn’t feel that way to me. They didn’t do a good job of showing his contributions to the research, his mechanical skill was mostly used for puppets, and the way he talked and acted was childish. It felt less like an adult friendship and more like a parent/child thing, or even the way you’d feel about a pet. He reminded me of dug from Up a little bit. On the whole I feel like the molecular research aspect was hard to portray through film in a way that resonated. The Martian felt more dynamic because of the type of problems he had to solve even though it’s a similar premise. Anyway, overall entertaining.
"I'm just a girl☺️🥰💖💞💅🌺🌷🦄" when you were eight and the teacher said she needed some strong boys to carry something you used to be furious, and when you convinced them to let you help, you carried twice as many chairs as the boys with the righteous anger of a girl who knew she was just as capable as them. Where did that go?
Not to take the wrong thing from this, but I feel it should also be mentioned this is not good for boys. Arbitrarily giving certain children manual labor when others don’t have to, and setting the expectation that this is a normal thing to do, can be very damaging to how someone views themselves and how they let people treat them. The burden should be shared fairly.
I just finished reading the first book of the Stormlight archive, and I really liked it. Not quite as much as Mistborn, but I do enjoy Sanderson’s style. I love world-building and lore, and he’s one of the best at it. Although even for me, I think this might have been a bit too much. Every page had a tangent into the food, or the outfits, or someone’s nails or hair. I usually get through 500 pages in about a month, so I expected this to take longer than usual at 1000 pages. But it took me five months. It was just way too slow at some points. To be fair, my chronic illness has been kind of flared this whole time, and I haven’t been sleeping well. That really kills my ability to focus on reading. Also, after seeing the chart of essences and the related body part at the end of the book, I’m starting to wonder if there was a purpose to the constant dwelling on otherwise extraneous physical descriptions. The lighteyes, obviously, but also the golden hair people, that guy who can change his skin by thought, the nails that, I think, flick sparks. I think all of these connect to an essence, and maybe every demographic in Roshar has some special weird body thing that connects to the magic system.
Unfortunately, we really only scratched the surface of the various fantastical elements of this world. It seems the people on Roshar don’t really understand Shards and spren, Kaladin definitely doesn’t understand surgebinding (and only really found out about it at the end), and Shallan has no idea whats going on with soulcasting. I think Szeth knows a lot more, but we didn’t get to spend a lot of time with him. I’m actually very curious about Szeth’s story. His whole thing with the oath stone fascinates me because he’s basically his own prison warden, but whatever happened to him made him so committed to it. And we barely got to hear anything about what life is like in Shinovar. There’s just that one interlude story.
Kaladin was obviously a major focus for this book, but, as much as I liked Kaladin, I found that part of the story very difficult. It’s not exactly a fantastical story, being a slave in the army. It’s just kind of sad, although I did find it very interesting how Sanderson was able to portray the military from the highest and lowest positions. That gave a really interesting perspective that I really enjoyed. It underscored how casual the lighteyes, especially Sadeas, are about the fates of those under their command. Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy Dalinar quite as much. The way that he was introduced was very much like he has a special sword and he has a special armor and he has a special horse and he has special eyes. He’s so very special. It got very old, and just lost a lot of weight to it. I’ve come to have a difficult time, generally, enjoying magical stories where there’s some subset of people that just have special powers for no particular reason. A lot of magic systems are like this, and it’s far less satisfying than seeing someone work to gain their power and overcome their challenges, in my opinion.
Dalinar’s story in particular, although the entire novel really, had a lot of philosophical weight to it. There was a lot of weighing what’s right and wrong and what should be done and how you ought to live your life, and I do like novels that have some meat to them, some interesting things to think about, but this felt a little moralizing for me. It felt like a little too much work. I still want things I read for relaxation to be primarily entertaining.
One of the more provoking parts of the world for me was how strict gender is, especially for the lighteyes. I feel that some of the traits that would typically be masculine in our world, historically academia and science and things, were given over to the noble women, leaving the men basically with leadership, manual labor, and dying in war, and that’s kind of depressing. It’s almost comical at points how strict and arbitrary the division is. They eat different food, at different tables. They have the whole “safe hand” thing. The men are staunchly illiterate and have to be read to like children. If the women can read all the books on leadership on their own, why don’t they just do leading? Most of the characters seemed openly disgusted whenever there was mention of someone acted outside the gender norms. This kind of thing, whether fictional or not, always begins to seem like the two genders are afraid of each other. It’s insane. I dearly hope that Sanderson has a reason for dwelling on these social constructs because it’s quite a lot to suffer through for no reason.
That being said, I found myself, and this is not uncommon for me, identifying more with the women in the story. I think I could be very happy being a light eyed woman and doing fabrial engineering, getting carried around in a palanquin, being attended by a flock of servants, and being courted by the opposite sex. I was a bit envious of Shallan’s time in Kharbranth, even though Kabsal turned out to be a fake. Otherwise, Shallan was a bit annoying. I didn’t realize how young she was supposed to be until a good way through. But I think I’ll grow to like her more as she comes into her own after being sheltered for so long. But Jasnah really bothers me with how cold, and brutal she can be. Although I am curious to see what she knows.
I had a hard time keeping track of a lot of the other characters. I kept losing track of what had been said about everyone in bridge four and all the supporting lighteyed characters. Making every background character have a full, well, character is one of the reasons why Sanderson’s worlds feel so rich, but it is a lot to handle. Honestly, the way he writes in general frustrates me sometimes. He’ll drop a hint of some important lore, or use a word that we haven’t seen before, and I just remember all the little mentions when they don’t connect to anything yet. I had to go back and check the some of interludes several times to try to figure out what they related to. I’m sure I missed other things. Maybe I should become a person that takes notes while I read, but that feels like schoolwork.
I do enjoy the magic lore though. The Shards, despite being central to the story, interest me the least. It is curious that the Radiants seemed to be able to use Shards and Surgebinding despite Szeth saying that his interfered. Surgebinding has a lot of interesting potential to be used creatively, and I’m excited to see how that plays out. However, as a system it doesn’t yet seem like there’s much of puzzle to figure out. Soulcasting, fabrials, and essences are very intriguing to me. I want to know what the different essences do, and what to rules for Soulcasting are, and what Shadsmar is, and why Shallan can see those creatures, and if Elokar is seeing them too, and why she doesn’t need a Soulcaster. I think somehow there can’t be sunlight. Every time we’ve seen it, it’s been night or in a cave. I need to read the short stories too, I think. I’ve been warned by multiple people that that’s where the deep lore is.
Overall though, this book felt like a set up for the rest of the story. There wasn’t as much of a central premise as I would expect. I tried to describe what it was about to a few different people and had a hard time. There’s no clear motivation yet. Usually there’s a big quest by now, but it’s been very character focused so far. Maybe that’s a good thing, maybe not. I’m still excited to see where things go though, and that’s the most important part.
the issue with growing up in the 2000s and 2010s was like there was this really big push toward "accepting your weirdness" overall but they meant like idk wearing mismatched socks or something not being tangibly beyond the norm in any way shape or form
