A survivor of Akuze Shepard having to deal with so many thresher maws throughout the trilogy is so funny

Shepard, lured by a fake distress signal only to come across a thresher maw nest: are you fucking kidding me

Shepard having to kill a thresher maw as part of Grunt's rite of passage: are you fucking kidding me

Shepard luring Kalros, mother of all thresher maws, to attack a reaper: are you FUCKING KIDDING ME

I've said this before but Why do people position "themes and analysis" and "shipping" as mutually exclusive opposites. maybe I find two characters thematically interesting and want them to analytically fuck about it.

Today I thought about fentanyl so hard that a cop a few blocks away exploded into pure energy

This is going to be a bit of a vent but I'm also curious if anyone else feels the same. Please share if you do ❤

Something I've been feeling more and more recently is the drive to be creative, and I'm going to be honest but it doesn't feel good? I've never been that good at art or music or woodworking or textiles or baking or anything expressive, really. When I see someone playing an instrument beautifully, constructing a lovely little ornament, or even just a reference sheet for someone's OC I feel an intense sense of longing.

The only thing I would consider myself notably good at is gaming, and that doesn't really feel like something I can share with people, as in I struggle to express myself with it? I can't show people how I feel by playing a run of Isaac the same way a pianist can with the notes they play. What I feel like I'm missing is the ability to draw a scene and have people see what I'm feeling inside. That sense of understanding that comes with damn good art.

I know the popular response on this site is "do it badly anyway" and I really do appreciate the sentiment but doing something badly just makes me feel truly awful. I can't get around that mental block no matter how hard I try and it's stopping me from practicing any of these skills. It doesn't feel like I have so much space to improve, it feels like I'll always be this bad because I always have been. Regardless of how provably untrue that is it's how I feel.

I want to be able to enjoy the process but that's simply impossible for me right now, not when everything I try ends up worse than I expect. I know it's a problem with my mindset and not a profound lack of talent but it's just as insurmountable a barrier to me. I wish I could play the violin.

Hello! I have been through this and I have SO MANY THOUGHTS! In fact, you have unlocked my personal art manifesto that I've been thinking about for the last couple of years.

Cucumber Lime Kombucha

1st Fermentation

2nd Fermentation

And now we wait.

Update: I accidentally made pickles.

I see posts go by periodically about how modern audiences are impatient or unwilling to trust the creator. And I agree that that's true. What the posts almost never mention, though, is that this didn't happen in a vacuum. Audiences have had their patience and trust beaten out of them by the popular media of the past few decades.

J J Abrams is famous for making stories that raise questions he never figures out how to answer. He's also the guy with some weird story about a present he never opened and how that's better than presents you open--failing to see that there's a difference between choosing not to open a present and being forbidden from opening one.

You've got lengthy media franchises where installments undo character development or satisfying resolutions from previous installments. Worse, there are media franchises with "trilogies" that are weird slap fights between the makers of each installment.

You've got wildly popular TV shows that end so poorly and unsatisfyingly that no one speaks of them again.

On top of that, a lot of the media actively punishes people for engaging thoughtfully with it. Creators panic and change their stories if the audience properly reacts to foreshadowing. Emotional parts of storytelling are trampled by jokes. Shocking the audience has become the go to, rather than providing a solid story.

Of course audiences have gotten cynical and untrusting! Of course they're unwilling to form their own expectations of what's coming! Of course they make the worst assumptions based on what's in front of them! The media they've been consuming has trained them well.

oh my god this New Yorker article about the Titan holy fucking shit fuck???

Some notes: 1. the electrical system was designed by engineering undergrads who were working as interns. 2. because it is illegal to take passengers on an unclassed experimental submersible, they called the passengers "mission specialists" & instead of buying tickets they made donations. 3. the satellite beacon was held onto the outside of the sub with zip ties. 4. when Lochridge (the whistleblower) quit, Stockton Rush asked HIS FINANCE DIRECTOR if she wanted to be the pilot and she was like "sir I am an accountant" and the experience of having her boss ask his accountant to be the pilot made her so freaked out that she ALSO quit the company 5. the carbon fiber used to make the hull was bought from a deep discount from Boeing because it was past its expiry date for use in airplanes

AND MUCH, MUCH MORE

Article copy-pasted under the cut because fuck paywalls.

Holy shit.

If you tried to write Stockton Rush as a movie villain people would say he was too over the top.

neocities guide - why you should build your own html website

what is neocities?

why should I make my own website?

what would I even put on a website?

getting started: neocities/html guide

fun stuff to add to your site

web revival manifestos & communities

in conclusion

is

is Neocities "new Geocities"???

You know we only ever really "learn" how to bathe in our youth as it is taught to us by our parents and from then on most people kinda just bathe the same way right. And like barring actively deciding to do it the only way most people change their bathing habits is if they bathe with a loved one and get convinced to do somethi g different in the bath bc its cleaner/faster/whatever bc of them. Ok heres the thesis statement. The lack of communal bathing in society is holding us back from discovering The Ultimate Bathing

@doctorworm

undertaker with she/hearse pronouns

There’s always a lingering question that I ask myself, which is why do I, a cis bisexual woman, enjoy romance between two men so much?  

There are easy answers, like that it’s just fetishizing.  And like, I find men attractive, yes.  But I also find women attractive.  I don’t have a problem with enjoying het romance, assuming I can find good ones.  I enjoy stories with female characters I can relate to.

But there’s something much deeper at play, IMO.  A friend of mine who is a gender studies professor was the first person to point this out to me, but a lot of women enjoy m/m romance and gay porn because of the lack of women.  It removes a source of pressure and sexism.  Without any women present, you don’t have to constantly evaluate the sexism of their portrayal, or be reminded of negative experiences in your own life.  It allows women to experience romance and especially sexuality without all the baggage that comes with it in our patriarchal society.

This was recently illustrated to me rather dramatically.  I read a recommendation for a het romance.  And it sounded cute, and came highly recommended.  The tropes at play were fun.  Until I read a snippet and realized this was a romance between a woman and her boss.  I had a visceral negative reaction.  

Instantly I’m thinking of sexual harassment stories I’ve read and heard from other women. I’m thinking of how uncomfortable it would be to have your boss develop feelings for you.  How icky the power dynamics would be, etc.  

And then I realized…this wouldn’t bother me if it were two men.  Now, there’s no logical reason for that.  Sexual harassment is just as wrong when its object is a man.  But I know I’ve read fics with a similar premise and never thought about it.  Because when it’s two men I can accept this is just a light romance, a fantasy, meant to be fun and sexy and not to represent the real world.

But I can’t when it’s a het relationship.  There’s too much baggage there.  Too much societal history of abuse.  I can’t relax enough with the premise to enjoy that story.  

Now some people can.  And that’s fine.  And some people are never going to be okay with power imbalances like that regardless of gender.  That’s also fine.  I don’t think having either reaction makes one morally superior.  It’s okay to just enjoy light entertainment for what it is without going into deep analysis.

But it’s much more difficult for me, and I think for many women, to relax and enjoy romantic and sexual stories when they involve female characters.  We’ve been burned too many times by shitty depictions, by shallow role models, by abuse portrayed as romantic.  We have developed a stress response, a trauma response to heterosexual romance.  We are hyper-reactive to a wide variety of triggers in regards to it.   But removing women from the equation makes stories safer for us.  And maybe it shouldn’t?  In an ideal world?  But for many of us, that’s the truth.

So this post blew up in the last 24 hours, for whatever reason, and I was looking through people’s responses, as you do.  I’m quite moved that so many found it relatable.

But I wanted to highlight one set of tags (via @reallifepotato​ )

Because I AM comfortable with my sexuality and fairly comfortable with my body, but still, this resonates so hard as someone who has always been overweight.  The amount that our society teaches women to constantly compare ourselves, almost always negatively with every other woman out there, can utterly ruin our enjoyment of this kind of thing.  Like how many times have you tried to watch a mainstream romantic comedy where some utterly gorgeous actress is bemoaning that she can’t get a date, or WORSE is made out to be less than attractive.  And you look at her and go…but she’s fucking perfect?  And you just want to puke.  

But with m/m romance you can put yourself in the place of either character and…not compare yourself.  You can enjoy a character being attractive without feeling bad about yourself, which is REALLY HARD to do for any woman in our fucked up culture.  

oh my god someone put it into words!!!!!

there are soooo many nuances and reasons that many of us aren’t even conscious of which makes me doubly angry when it’s dismissed as fetishizing.  fuck off and let me read my love stories pls.

nail on the goddamn head there

Also, a lot of m/m fiction offers the notion of an actual friends-to-lovers storyline that isn’t cluttered by sex-first. There’s a foundation there that doesn’t get allowed for in m/f fiction. If there’s a m/f friendship in any media, it’s usually either an automatic love interest on the immediate horizon, or it’s dismissed and not explored as any kind of important to a story. People complain about m/m fiction like “Why can’t two guys just be FRIENDS?!” and i’m over here wanting to know “Why can’t two -anything- just be FRIENDS?!” and m/m fiction is usually the only place i can get that.  Also… “fuck off and let me read my love stories pls.” This.

fuck man, this post just summarized something I’ve been trying to put into words for years

Like, fetishization of same sex relationships is a serious issue but it’s very different from what this post talks about and its really important to distinguish between the two

This post is getting notes again and I have to thank @an-actual-corvid for their tags.

#this was very eye-opening for me thank you for writing this out so that I may understand#i agree with all of this but the last comment rang in my head#the distinguishing between fetishes and enjoyment of the romance is not something I’ve seen in conversation#which made me adverse to women consuming m/m romance. I only heard of the m/m fetishization which as a gay man makes me incredibly upset#i understand now that there are multiple sides to this idea of why women consume m/m media#and that the distinction is so important#thank you again for posting this#you have opened my eyes to new possibilities and I have new knowledge in my back pocket so that I do not make any more#hasty judgements on ladies who consume m/m romance#thank you for pointing out a prejudice that I held in such a way that wasn’t babying me or others while still being kind about it#i have some processing I need to do. some rewiring of my brain.#thank you again#(I hope I worded this correctly and that I didn’t upset anyone with my tags.)#I had a femme friend who would exclusively read yaoi and would gush to me about her ‘uwu soft bois’ and ‘how gay they were for each other#‘and how they should just fuck already.’#‘but they’re my uwu soft bois and they’re so cute’#fuck it made me nauseous#I know now what I knew then and that was that what my friend was doing was fetishizing m/m relationships#and that is what soured me on the idea.#this post has turned my head to new ideas and feelings. thank you#while the fetishization of m/m relationships still greatly makes me upset and uncomfortable#i now know that that is not the only reason why women consume m/m media.#thank you

Mostly for personal reasons, because I’ve gotten a good amount of animosity and anon hate from gay men (or those claiming to be so) as a result of this post, so this was nice to read.

As usual I think people need to be much less kneejerk in how they relate because all humans are complicated. A lot of women need to consider how they talk about objects of their gaze because it often makes me uncomfortable. But also we are all motivated by a variety of factors. For example perhaps your friend you mention was really drawn into nonthreatening portrayals of masculinity and that’s the aspect she focused on for a reason.

IDK the way we play with and interact with gender and sex in this fucked up world is messy. Queer men play with femininity and women play with queer masculinity. In different ways and for different reasons. And it’s very late/early and I need to stop typing.