this video has firmly lodged itself into my brain like i cant stop fucking saying cinnamon snails cinnamon snails while performing tasks. ill experience literally any minor inconvenience and the OH NO will ring out in my brain. my nickname in every discord server is cinnamon snails now

when you call your reps to ask them to pretty please stop taking away your rights, remember:

remember to call because that way their phone is going off and their peers can hear it because their offices are close together (emails and letters don't work like that), so it can rattle them if they get high volumes. remember that you gotta make them feel like they're losing something.

Talking points I've been using in my blood red state:

"As a taxpayer," "As a parent," and "As a homeowner" are key phrases.

there was a tiktok I made a while ago basically saying "your abusive ex boyfriend is more likely a misogynist than a narcissist" and while most people agreed some said I was victim blaming(?) and that I couldn't know what their ex is like, and while obviously I don't, every fucking person describing their narcissistic ex is describing a typical misogynist. ask yourself, is this behavior you associate with narcissism directed at women or does he treat his male friends the same way? is his general functioning in life impaired?

many people don't seem to know this, but a mental disorder is NOT based on symptoms alone, it's based on how much the symptoms actually impair you in daily life. most people could look at a list of mental disorder symptoms and identify either themselves or someone else with them. as far as a narcissistic personality, we all know people who appear more self absorbed than others, but this is typically subclinical narcissism (presence of narcissistic traits without significant impairment of functioning) which is not a disorder. there is also a misunderstanding of what npd is. a narcissist is not a supervillain invincible to emotion. npd is a defensive reaction to trauma that lead to deep insecurity and fear of being seen as weak or vulnerable. so narcissists aren't actually "in love with themselves" at all and often are diagnosed when seeking help for other issues such as substance abuse resulting from their struggles.

this focus a lot of abused women in online pop psychology have on narcissism is particularly concerning because it completely glosses over misogyny which is literally a huge factor in violence against women. people really only know misogyny as a surface level thing. they don't know it can lead to family annihilation, for example, and is one reason most family annihilations are committed by the husband. it's always "this man is a sociopath" "this man is a narcissist" when the man's behavior is driven by ideology. I am so fucking tired of everything being tied to mental illness and left at that. you know what this leads to? courts "fixing" abusive men by...giving them anger management therapy. guess what? it doesn't fucking do anything because the problem isn't mental instability leading to anger, it's targeted, purposeful abuse. we are getting nowhere

I'm not toxic, i just get a little insane when i love someone too much.

this site really hates people with ocd

“reblog this or you don’t support minorities!” “if you don’t reblog this then all of your followers should hate you!” “if you have a bad thought then you actually think that way and you’re a horrible person!” “you can only like ‘good’ things and if you like something ‘bad’ then you’re awful!” i am going to throttle you with my bare hands

I'm built different. like incorrectly i think

i bet crossing spears with someone to block entry into a location feels so fucking good

another old-account exhumation, for those who missed it the first time.

PSA: Don't use Open Office

I keep seeing people recommending Open Office as an alternative to Word, and uh... look, it is, technically, an open source alternative to Word. And it can do a lot of what Word can, genuinely! But it is also an abandoned project that hasn't been updated in nine years, and there's an active fork of it which is still receiving updates, and that fork is called LibreOffice, and it's fantastic.

Seriously, if you think that your choices are either "grit your teeth and pay Microsoft for a subscription" or "support free software but have a kind of subpar office suite experience", I guarantee that it's because you're working with outdated information, or outdated software. Most people I know who have used the latest version of LibreOffice prefer it to Word. I even know a handful of people who prefer it to Scrivener.

Open Office was the original project, and so it has the most name recognition, and as far as I can tell, that's really the only reason people are still recommending it. It's kind of like if people were saying "hey, the iPhone 14 isn't your only smart phone option!" but then were only ever recommending the Samsung Galaxy S5 as an alternative. LibreOffice is literally a version of the same exact program as Open Office that's just newer and better – please don't get locked into using a worse tool just because the updated version of the program has a different name!

I don't trust anyone who hasn't acknowledged their capacity for evil.

"I'm just a smol bean uwu" No sir, what you are is someone who is so habituated to thinking of yourself as innocent that you will continue to do so even when you're guilty.

There’s a string of episodes in season 5, 5x04-5x07, where Spike realizes he has feelings for Buffy that cement into love by the end of 5x07, but there’s a moment in 5x06 that I find particularly interesting.

Spike is present when Tara’s spell breaks and the Scoobies realize that they were placed in danger. Despite this, Buffy immediately takes Tara under her protection, highlighting both her strength and kindness.

Spike can’t take his eyes off her.

After all, these are the things he will highlight in his speech to her in 7x20, the reasons that she is The One. In this moment, she shows that it’s not just an act; her righteousness and big heart is part of her. It’s so compelling that he also makes what can arguably be his first selfless action, punching Tara to prove she isn’t half-demon. This is the moment that he begins to move towards becoming a force of good just by being around Buffy.

Few things I find interesting:

-The professor that Buffy goes to when she's dropping out of college teaches poetry. The scene isn't short either, and she goes into detail about how much she loves his class and loves poetry and wants to keep reading poetry.

Foreshadowing?

-In season 6 when Tara asks Buffy if she loves Spike, she doesn’t say no. She doesn't answer.

-When Buffy 'breaks up' with Spike she says "I can't love you." Not "I don't love you." As if she is actively making the choice to not love him to not act on that love instead of simply not loving him at all ever. She very deliberately distanced herself from her feelings for him because he was soulless.

-And then in season 7 she has the line "Why does everyone think I'm still in love with Spike?" Still? Interesting.

Anyway, the argument that Buffy didn't mean her "I love you." To Spike at the end of s7 is bullshit and I will absolutely fight anyone on that. And yes, she loved him romantically and had for a long time, but her choice regarding her love for him always played a factor in her words to him and others.

When it came to love and using the word Love, Buffy had been sparse and deliberate in her use of it for a long time. Her saying "I love you." Was a Choice and she Meant it. She wouldn't lie like that.

Additionally, trying to pull "She said she would never love anyone the way she loved Angel" blah blah. People love different people differently. In a proper story, characters don't exist in a vacuum. They are dynamic. Time passes. They grow. Buffy grew. Spike grew. Spike loved Buffy with or without a soul. Buffy loved Spike the same.

it is my opinion that there should have been more play on Buffy and Spike both dyeing their hair.

“Character A didn’t love Character B because they hurt them” discourse is truly terrible because it assigns a moral value to love that simply does not exist. love doesn’t actually mean anything about someone’s character. it doesn’t make someone’s actions toward another any better or any worse, it doesn’t prevent atrocities, and it doesn’t prevent abuse.

love is a worthless emotion when it comes to morals because it simply holds no bearing on them. true love doesn’t exist. there is no better or more pure version of love. in the end love doesn’t mean anything. it’s a non-emotion. it’s the child of passion and affection and dedication. doing something bad doesn’t preclude a feeling of love, because a lack of love isn’t a requirement for immoral actions, and morality isn’t a requirement for feeling love.

I think that the Thing that gets people about btvs when they talk about 'bad' characters and forgiving characters for their evil misdeeds is that the show is fundamentally about being a human... in completely unhuman conditions. Like especially when we talk about Spike and spuffy, there's always people asking 'but how can you excuse ___' and the thing is, its not about excusing certain behaviors, but rather giving them context that wouldn't exist in our world. Like spuffy s6 is super toxic- they hit each other, use each other, generally are abusive, and while that behavior is not excusable or forgivable, the context is that we have two characters who are literally mortal enemies trying to sort out complex human feelings for each other.

Its about taking flawed humans and putting them in fucked up situations AND THEN also taking away their soul, giving them a soul, giving them superhuman strength, giving them trauma that a human in the real world could never ever have because the supernatural conditions that perfectly aligned to fuck them over simply don't exist in reality. And in doing all of this, the show stretches the limits of the human condition, asks what ifs that we can't pretend to know the real answers to. Thats whats so great about the show, but also kinda hard to wrap your mind around, especially as a first time viewer