WELCOME BACK! For those who logged off, this is what you missed.

1. @staff made a post pretty much saying “Your stuff isn’t getting deleted, just hidden from everyone but you” and “Yeah we know you hate the term “female presenting nipples” but we ain’t gonna stop saying it” 2. If a blog has a pixelated icon that means they got hit by the ban, you cannot view that blog outside the sidebar. You cannot even view their archive. Allegedly if you follow the advice in this post it’ll be fixed but only if it was an accidental flag (aka a real sfw blog) 3. The post Staff made including examples of what was ok to post. It got flagged. 4. Yes, the bots are still here. Yes they are still stealing posts and putting porn links on them. Yes there are still ads with stuff more sexual than they allow in posts. Yes innocent things are still getting flagged. 5. So yes, the site is still here and staff are still morons.

“Starter house”?????? We’re supposed to have more than one house???????

NPR just went, “They’re poor, Harold.”

I grew up hearing the phrase “you never stick with anything, what’s the point” a lot. I’ve always been attracted towards seemingly disconnected interests, and gone through phases of being really into something. But eventually my interest would fade and I would move onto something else. 

Or at least that’s always how it’s been phrased for me, by others. Now I realize that my interest for the old thing didn’t fade so much as my interest for something new outshined it, and that’s vastly different. 

I was always made to feel bad about it, with every abandoned endeavour I was told I needed to stop starting things if I wasn’t going to stick with them. I was told I was wasting time and money picking up these random interests and abandoning them after a year. 

So eventually, I stopped picking things up. I told myself “what’s the point, I’m going to give up in a year anyway”. Even worse, I started dismissing every new interest, because I had no way of knowing if my interest was “real” enough or just another passing phase. I stopped trying new things, I stopped looking up stuff that piqued my curiosity, and having chronic depression made it really easy to leave everything on the dirty floor of neglected ideas. The more they piled up, the more depressing it was. All these things that could be nice, but I just can’t take care of them. 

I realize now how bullshit that kind of thinking is. So what if I stopped doing karate after a year? That’s one more year of karate than most people I know. And in that year I learned discipline, I learned to listen to a teacher, something I had never done before in all my years of private education. I learned the true meaning of respect, that it’s something you do out of faith at first and maintain as it’s reciprocated, not something you do blindly and regardless of how you’re treated. 

It gave me the foundation for the determination and grounding I needed to practice yoga. Another year. Not enough to be good at it maybe, but again a year more than most people I know and a year that is not lost, but gained. I learned balance, I learned to listen to my body, I learned how to let go of emotional tightness through physical stretching. 

And then iaido, only a few weeks because I couldn’t afford to keep going. The year of yoga I had done a couple years previous had given me a better starting point than the other newcomers to the class. I already had balance, I had strength in my legs and I had better posture. In those months I learned the importance of precision, the true definition of efficacy, the zen state that is incessant repetition. 

Did I practice long enough to get good at iaido, and yoga, and karate? No. Of course not. It takes years to become proficient and decades to master any of those things, but I learned other skills and those skills were an invaluable part of my growth both spiritually and emotionally. Likewise for my forays into painting, sewing, graphic design, film. I’m a photography student now heading into my second year of school, and every single second of practice I have in those other disciplines has given me more experience in those areas and made learning easier. 

Skills carry over. They intersect and connect in ways that are sometimes unexpected. Nothing is ever lost, experience is never a waste of time or worthless or stupid. Allow your focus to wander, reflect on what you learn, and consider how you can keep using it in other aspects of your life. Stop telling people their interests aren’t worth their time. 

‘A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one’

^^^^The real jack of all trades quote if anyone’s i interested.

For a week I was super into making LED arrays. 

For a few months I was really into costume makeup. 

For a year I was into sewing clothes

For a few months I was into sculpting and molding and casting

I’ve always had a sustained interest in animals, but the hyperfocus on birds in particular made me very familiar with feather formations. 

Couple months I loved the idea of engineering moving sculptures. 

Add all that together, and hot diggity shit, that’s some SOLID basework for making costumes, cosplay, and other impressive props.

—–

For a week I was into welding and took a welding class.

A year of interest in woodworking and fiddling with the tools means I’m fairly good at that as well. 

Add that to the engineering from earlier and the focus on balance and stable structures means I can make my own furniture - Couches, shelves, desks, just give me the material and tools and I can make it happen. 

—

Brief interest in business law meant two classes taken in college, and an accidental qualification for a business degree. 

Those same classes let me point out some serious litigation bait in a friend’s startup company. 

—-

A wide array of interests means I also have a TON of little nitpicky facts about how the world works, which translates into amazing immersive writing. 

I know how it feels to use a chisel, and the delicate precision of electronics. I know the smell of forests and barns and old yarn being put to use again. The bloody smell of a freshly slaughtered chicken, and the anticipatory fear moments before skydiving. 

The pattern of a bad weld and a good one, and the careful calculation of load bearing walls when building underground.  Anyway, this world is HUGE and really cool. Why on earth would I want to stick to learning ONE thing, when there’s HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of things I could learn?

For anybody still struggling with this, I highly recommend this book:

Sorry for reblogging my own post (again), but this is another awesome addition to it, and there have been several people commenting who have also read this book or went out to get it at @primarybufferpanel‘s suggestion and are loving it. 

And for all of you saying “I needed this post”, check the comments! There are some really beautiful replies and encouraging stories that people have shared. 

hell year hell year hell year hell year hell year hell year hell year hell year hell year hell year

(from a 2015 interview)

i hope she’s comfortable

Please don’t forget the best one so far^^^

Please spread the word that enrollment for health care ends Dec 15. #obamacare

A cat with a strange addiction 🍞

SCREAMING Oreo sis………..the carbs

“Not just any warlock. The most powerful one in New York.”

There is nothing more healing to the soul than my cat kneading and purring on me especially when I am about to drift off to sleep. Cats are magical creatures

In those moments nothing else matters. There’s no stress or anxiety. Everything just melts away. The most purest form of love

What have you done today to make you feel proud? 

tumblr setting the house on fire to get rid of a snake instead of calling animal control is perfectly in character tbh

Real talk, though, because it needs to be said: as much as we all joke that porn was the only good thing this place had left, the reality is that it being the only place where one could regularly engage with and promote sexual content being gone is really not understanding at all what makes this place special. I mean we all joke about “horny on main” and all that, but the reality is that for a lot of the LGTBQ+ community, particularly younger members still discovering themselves and members in extremely homophobic environments where most media sites were banned (but Tumblr wasn’t even considered important enough to be), this was a bastion of information and self-expression. For a lot of artists too, this was a great place to come and post NSFW work and get traction that became Patreon pages that became honest jobs. The problem with “family friendly” social media is that more often than not, the ones hit  the most by the whole family friendly nonsense are marginalized groups that have no vehicles to express themselves. Stuff like YouTube consistently bans or flags simple content featuring something as innocuous as two men kissing as “adult” content and makes it hard for LGBTQ+ content creators to compete with their non-queer peers for a lot of those reasons. The ultimate problem isn’t even that banning of NSFW content, it’s the general mess surrounding it and unintended consequences to these groups. For MONTHS Tumblr has had a huge problem with porn spam bots and outright child pornography, and for MONTHS the majority of the userbase has been in general consensus that both of these things needed to stop. Tumblr did NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. When Apple finally removed their app from the store, SPECIFICALLY because of the child pornography, Tumblr decided to do what any rich corporation owning a social media site with zero understanding of what makes it popular would do, and decided that the best course of action was to eat itself like an Ouroboros. Rather than admit that they have done an absolutely shit job at keeping pedophiles off this website and rather than hiring the necessary staff to carefully moderate content, they decided to loose a poorly programmed bot that literally deleted perfectly SFW blogs with thousands of followers, and rather than properly handling moderation, they decided that it was best to simply go the lazy route and block anything even remotely NSFW. They run this site in the worst way possible, and I don’t understand how @support or @staff or their completely oblivious “CEO” plans to keep this sinking ship alive.

the reality is that for a lot of the LGTBQ+ community, particularly younger members still discovering themselves and members in extremely homophobic environments where most media sites were banned (but Tumblr wasn’t even considered important enough to be), this was a bastion of information and self-expression.