Eliot Spencer Gender Envy

“this is the hill you want to die on?” oh no i just love arguing. i fully intend to leave this hill once it gets boring. sorry for the confusion!

i hate how they market alexa as a ‘member of the family’ like that’s SO fucking blatantly insidious and terrifying also if i wanted an untrustworthy/cold/emotionless machine in my life i’d just talk to my fuckin father 

“Guys stop bullying my wiretap”

#did we all collectively forget why Big Brother was called that

Recent discourse reminds me of that cult indoctrination trick that's often used to weed out more difficult marks early on, where they tell you all that you aren't allowed to eat rice on Tuesdays and then if you protest they go "wow SOMEBODY likes rice a little much huh" as if you're the fucking weirdo who cares too much about how much rice is consumed between Monday and Wednesday instead of them.

And this forces you to decide whether your autonomy matters to you more than the approval of the group - while they'll still act like you're on thin ice either way, if you give in at this point they know you're theirs forever, because now they've established a foothold, you've shown a moral weakness, which they will brand you with so it can be used against you in the future ("hey RICE-addict here doesn't want help break into the city records office") to force you to double-down and isolate you further.

And if instead you do decide to push back further, after your abrupt departure from the group ("You're seriously leaving us over RICE?!? Seriously?") and subsequent ostracism, you can then be used as a demonstration to the others who were more pliable, of how the outgroup is full of people like you who are obsessed with violating the No-Tuesday-Rice rule to the point where they'll abandon all their friends, who cared so much for them, so it clearly isn't an arbitrary restriction, you're the kind of monster these rules are intended to protect them from, thus all the other wise and esoteric precepts of the charismatic leader are implied to be equally justified.

This isn't just for cults either! Shitty partners, bosses, friends - they all do variants of this where if you kick back the first time they make an unreasonable request, it proves you weren't ever committed since you'd let such a small thing ruin everything. And of course, if it's the third or the tenth unreasonable thing they ask of you, it's SUCH A SMALL THING to be a deal-breaker at this late point in your relationship!

I can’t stop thinking about this scene from Profit and Loss, and what it implies. For anyone who doesn’t recall, Quark is making sure that various objects in his vicinity are not Odo. He slaps the table. He examines the chairs. And he DIPS HIS FINGER INTO A MUG AND TASTES THE LIQUID. After which he is satisfied that Odo isn’t around.

W.

T.

F.

It’s a little throwaway scene but it rocks my world, because it implies not only that Odo has a specific flavor that he cannot change - which makes *flavor* Odo’s sole immutable quality - but also that QUARK KNOWS WHAT ODO TASTES LIKE. I want to know so much more about this. I want to know how many times Quark has tasted Odo. I want to know how it happened the first time. I want to know if Quark ever drank an entire glass of Odo, and if so, whether he figured it out in time and was able to induce vomiting, or if he didn’t and Odo suffered indignities we cannot even fathom. I want to know if Odo knows he has a flavor, and that Quark can recognize it, or if that’s a secret Quark keeps from him for his own advantage. I want to know everything about this because this is the weirdest aspect of an already totally insane relationship dynamic. I cannot handle how messed up Deep Space 9 is.

bro i'm so tired of companies brute-forcing you to sign in to an account on their site for everything. why the actual fuck do i have to sign into the youtube app on the fucking playstation just to access said app's previously-available basic ass features like watch history and recommendations

are you not already satisfied tracking the account on my laptop?? is it not enough??? are you so hungry and desperate for data to sell and target ads to that you need to track me on my gaming console too? i hope you starve you monopolistic bitch

i started doing things scared and doing things alone years ago the real challenge is doing things tired

“if you’re working a full time job you should be able to afford to live on your own and have access to food and transportation” gonna be real with you brother. everyone deserves this. Not just people working 40 hrs a week

people inherently deserve to have a roof over their heads and to eat and live comfortably. not tied to whatever work they do or do not do. Shocking, i know

The Good Place (2016-2020)

brah

The Good Place’s take on morality is so important to me. It never suggests that being good is easy or straightforward - quite the opposite - but it says, over and over again, that we need to try because we’re all people and we all matter.

Let’s not forget to acknowledge Alexandre Dumas this Black History Month

The writer of two of the most well known stories worldwide, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo was a black man. 

That’s excellence.

Let’s not forget that he was played on screen by a white man. And the fact that he was black is barely ever mentioned or the book he wrote inspired by his experiences.

Other things not to forget about Alexandre Dumas:

ALSO IMPORTANT:

SWAG

I am absolutely ashamed to admit I had NO idea Dumas was black.

when this post first went around (a year ago apparently) I was like BUT WHAT ABOUT DADDY DUMAS THOUGH because basically

I was never taught that he was Black either. WTF.

General Dumas (aka Thomas Alexandre Davy de La Pailleterie) looked like this…

…and like this…

…while “Napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus“…

:-D

I suspect Alexandre Dumas would have laughed at that, because besides looking like someone who laughed a lot…

…he was also a foodie.

He was also born in present-day Haiti. Back then, it was the French colony of Saint-Domingue.

General Dumas was also the highest ranking officer of African descent to have command of a European army. EVER. 

Napoleon is often portrayed as short even though he was of average height for his day. Some historians believe this stems from the mix up with the Egyptians thinking Dumas Sr was in charge and then seeing Napoleon, who was at least half a foot shorter than him, and being unimpressed

not to detract from the point about diagnosis being important, but this can absolutely happen even to diagnosed children. a diagnosis doesn't magically make everyone around you understanding and accepting of autism (or any other form of neurodivergence), especially since public knowledge of it is still severely lacking (and was even more so in the not-so-distant past). i was diagnosed at age 6, and yet this thread describes my childhood experiences to a t, even after diagnosis. i was never given terms like "sensory overwhelm". i was left lost and confused and believing everything was my fault. when i was 12, i began violently suppressing my autistic symptoms because i was ashamed of them and longed to be "normal" (which, as you can probably imagine, wasn't great for my mental health). it wasn't until over a decade after my diagnosis that i finally began to understand my autism - and by extension myself - better, through reading blog posts written by other autistic people.

i hope this doesn't come across as antagonistic - i'm not trying to argue against the screenshotted twitter thread, which does make a lot of good points. i just wanted to offer a different perspective. the autistic community on tumblr seems to be mostly made up of late- and self-diagnosed people, and sometimes there's this assumption that those of us who were diagnosed as children had it easier somehow, which sadly often wasn't the case.

Details from around AL-Aqsa mosque in Palestine by Nour ilayan.

This collection shows the great Islamic architecture of the buildings inside the mosque - including the Dome of the Rock which was constructed by the order of  Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik  - even in the smallest details . 

Do you want to know how to help the people of the DRC? Go donate money to focuscongo.com, that's one possibility.

You can also donate physical objects in high demand right now, if you have the $ to pay for international shipping prices, and send to this address [10 Avenue Des Messagers, Quartier Les Volcans, Commune de Goma, Ville de Goma, Province du Nord-Kivu, République Démocratique du Congo]. They need just about everything you use in a day to get by.

However! If you are in the U.S., you can send (shoes only) your packages to this address in the U.S. [Exile International, Entrance F. 3534 West End Ave. Nashville, TN 37205, United States] which will ship them to the previously listed address, so it's less cost for you!

And finally, you can also go volunteer with Focus Congo! Fill out the application here, and email them at info@focuscongo.com, make sure to attach your resumé / CV, so they assign you to work that best suits your capabilities. Foreverjuicebae / juicebaeinthewild is one such volunteer and she posts regularly about the conditions of Congolese people in the DRC.

Please reblog! Likes don't help, reblogs spread the word.

Focus Congo is highly rated by Charity Navigator

Also increasingly aware that a LOT of people "manage" getting through the 40+ hour work week by sleeping less than is healthy and relying on stimulants like coffee and energy drinks to keep them going.

For people who are unwilling or unable to do this...work really does just dominate your life. Like we really should not have to rely on unhealthy practices just to have a social life or keep on top of housework or whatever.

I know I post about this a lot but I'm so TIRED all the time and it's just so depressing that this is how we're expected to spend the one life we have.

Ya know when people told me “when you’re finally safe enough that you can leave survival mode and start to let go of and process your c-ptsd/trauma things are probably going to get really, really bad before they slowly start to get better” I thought that was reasonable. I did not understand that by “things are going to get bad” they meant “you’re going to find yourself in the worst mental state of your entire life, but dw, that means it’s working” and tbh I simply wish someone had been more clear.

Not letting these stay in the tags, damn. Let yourself be Goop.

Yes you will be goo. But even that analogy doesn’t fully express how difficult it is to be the goo.

Turning your current defense mechanisms to goo means opening yourself to feelings that have seemed unsafe. It can also mean facing harsh realities as you open yourself up to the honest truth of how bad things were. And then it kinda hurts all over in a different way.

It will be the worst mental state of your life until your brain rewires itself with boundaries, healthy coping mechanisms, and accepts the fact that you are safe now. And part of the reason you will succeed is because through this process you’ll learn how to keep yourself safer. How to recognize red flags. How to listen to your body when it’s telling you that something is off.

This is also why it’s heavily encouraged that you Not push yourself farther than you can handle. It’s why therapists make sure you know breathing exercises and have a support system before they talk about your deepest traumas.

You can’t walk into this kind of thing without at least something to fall back on when things get difficult, because they will get difficult.

You can’t become a butterfly if you don’t know how to get passed being goo first.

And if it’s any solace:

I’m still goo.

But I see where I’ve come from and I’d never let myself or anyone else be treated that way. It makes me sad to think that I ever thought I deserved so little. That I surrounded myself with people who didn’t truly care for me just because I didn’t know better or thought I didn’t deserve better or didn’t want to believe they were hurting me on purpose.

…And I would never go back to that. I would never accept that again.

And that means, even though I’m still goo, it’s working. And that means I won’t ever be that unsafe again. So being goo for bit? Its worth every tear and flutter of anger and helplessness and vulnerability.

Healing is hard, but it’s not as hard as being traumatized.

And you survived that for this long, right?

It’ll be hard, but you’ll be okay.

Watterson pulled no punches