And while we're talking about ai theft: turn. off. grammarly. Disable it. Delete it. Get that shit off of your computer ASAP.
I never realized how much of my shit is scanned by grammarly until today. It scans my emails, my text posts on this bewitched platform, my wips on google docs, my youtube comments--literally everything ive ever typed on my laptop is scanned by grammarly. And I've been allowing this to happen for years.
Turn. Off. Grammarly.
the older I get, the more the technological changes I've lived through as a millennial feel bizarre to me. we had computers in my primary school classroom; I first learned to type on a typewriter. I had a cellphone as a teenager, but still needed a physical train timetable. my parents listened to LP records when I was growing up; meanwhile, my childhood cassette tape collection became a CD collection, until I started downloading mp3s on kazaa over our 56k modem internet connection to play in winamp on my desktop computer, and now my laptop doesn't even have a disc tray. I used to save my word documents on floppy discs. I grew up using the rotary phone at my grandparents' house and our wall-connected landline; my mother's first cellphone was so big, we called it The Brick. I once took my desktop computer - monitor, tower and all - on the train to attend a LAN party at a friend's house where we had to connect to the internet with physical cables to play together, and where one friend's massive CRT monitor wouldn't fit on any available table. as kids, we used to make concertina caterpillars in class with the punctured and perforated paper strips that were left over whenever anything was printed on the room's dot matrix printer, which was outdated by the time I was in high school. VHS tapes became DVDs, and you could still rent both at the local video store when I was first married, but those shops all died out within the next six years. my facebook account predates the iphone camera - I used to carry around a separate digital camera and manually upload photos to the computer in order to post them; there are rolls of undeveloped film from my childhood still in envelopes from the chemist's in my childhood photo albums. I have a photo album from my wedding, but no physical albums of my child; by then, we were all posting online, and now that's a decade's worth of pictures I'd have to sort through manually in order to create one. there are video games I tell my son about but can't ever show him because the consoles they used to run on are all obsolete and the games were never remastered for the new ones that don't have the requisite backwards compatibility. I used to have a walkman for car trips as a kid; then I had a discman and a plastic hardshell case of CDs to carry around as a teenager; later, a friend gave my husband and I engraved matching ipods as a wedding present, and we used them both until they stopped working; now they're obsolete. today I texted my mother, who was born in 1950, a tiktok upload of an instructional video for girls from 1956 on how to look after their hair and nails and fold their clothes. my father was born four years after the invention of colour televison; he worked in radio and print journalism, and in the years before his health declined, even though he logically understood that newspapers existed online, he would clip out articles from the physical paper, put them in an envelope and mail them to me overseas if he wanted me to read them. and now I hold the world in a glass-faced rectangle, and I have access to everything and ownership of nothing, and everything I write online can potentially be wiped out at the drop of a hat by the ego of an idiot manchild billionaire. as a child, I wore a watch, but like most of my generation, I stopped when cellphones started telling us the time and they became redundant. now, my son wears a smartwatch so we can call him home from playing in the neighbourhood park, and there's a tanline on his wrist ike the one I haven't had since the age of fifteen. and I wonder: what will 2030 look like?
My grandfather, who is 100, remembers his dad’s accountant doing math on an abacus. Now he texts me “<3” on his flip phone.
i hope you write (i hope we both write)
hand in unedited hand
Internet Safety
Being hyper-secretive online is probably the only good kneejerk reaction boomers have put into our heads twenty years ago and now both them and the next generation look at you like you're a freak if you don't list your social security number in your carrd.
this one’s gonna be good
womp womp
thought I would join in
before i was a faggot or a tranny or an autist i was weird and surprisingly just being weird is enough to make people treat you like all of the above
"why are so many of your friends queer" because they're the only people who accepted me as a weird neurodivergent teenager when it felt like the whole world was against us and everything mattered too much.
Do you guys remember how kidnap fantasies were popular on wattpad because young girls and queer teens were both made to feel shame at the thought of their own sexualities, so the fantasy of being kidnapped totally against their will was a way for them to engage with a romantic or sexual fantasy without feeling morally in the wrong for doing so? Added bonus that the fantasy involved being whisked away from repressive environments like home or school, right?
Finding out that Bram Stoker was in a sexless marriage and that scholars believe that he very likely was closeted gay puts the entire book into perspective as to WHY it reads EXACTLY like a self insert wattpad Dracula kidnap fic:
“I TOTALLY love my wife and would never do anything that an upstanding Good Straight Working Man wouldn’t do but oh nooo, big strong man with broad back and strong enough arms to carry me back to bed like a princess trapped me and claimed me as his, completely against my will 👉👈 But he protects me against the bad evil sexual women (who I assure you, I am TOTALLY sexually attracted to, as any straight man with a choice would be) but trust me, I do NOT want ANY of this. What’s that? The Count is not capable of feeling love? Would be a shame if I had the special ability to change tha-”
This is also the fantasy behind all those old bodice-ripper romances that people today like to mock or call problematic, by the way.
“Oh, my next forty years are going to consist of nothing but washing dishes and keeping house and bearing children for the disdainful man I married right out of high school because my parents said college was for men and I had no other obvious life path open to me? What if a pirate captain thought I was worth stealing away from it all? [what if I ran away but no-one could blame me for leaving]?”
#I read an article a long time ago about a woman who was raised in an incredibly repressive conservative christian community#where all that mattered was purity and virginity etc #She talked about how for a long time rape fantasies were the only way she could derive any pleasure from sex #because she couldn’t feel safe exploring the idea of wanting sex #it wasn’t really ABOUT rape or eroticizing assault or whatever #it was about creating a scenario where she was free from the shame associated with wanting #i think this is true of a lot of icky-seeming stuff in romance and erotica #it’s an imaginary scenario where nothing you don’t really want actually happens #but you can’t be blamed or feel guilty for it #you didn’t do anything wrong#anyway that article changed my perspective a lot #i think there’s also something to be said for people who have felt ugly and undesirable their whole lives #enjoying fictional scenarios where a hot alpha werewolf or whatever is so attracted to them he ‘cant help himself’ or whatever #because it can also be really shameful to want to be desired #when you feel like youre ugly and gross ( @headspace-hotel )
#i had recently similar realization when stumbling into pit of y/n x character stories about “your dad’s handsome best friend”#it immediately introduces age gap where the man (usually) is middle aged and generally experienced#and y/n is a young adult at best but always exploring their sexuality for the first time#of course part of why this trope is popular is that teens tend to have crushes on adults#but I kept wondering why it has to be dad’s best friend until it hit me: it’s about safety#person who is your parents friend is a person who isn’t scum bc otherwise your parents would be friends with them#they’re safe and not a predator preying on young and impressionable like a groomer might#they’re your parents friend so they care about you too#which makes the fantasy at the same time spicy (age difference) and safe (dad’s bestie can’t hurt you)#idk it’s just interested how sometimes our brains try to justify things to us
@thirstyforred i hope you don’t mind me pulling up your tags because you’ve made a GREAT point which I think is also echoed in the following tropes:
While irl age gap relationships very much have the potential to be predatory, it is worth recognising why some people consider them attractive in fiction and what these fantasies help them explore.
I’m sorry to bring up HP, but let’s take Snape, for example, since I remember him being a massive hot commodity back on 2012 Deviantart. I heavily doubt that most tweens girls who had a crush on Snape would actually want to get on with their teacher - it was just a fictional crush which allowed them to explore their likes and dislikes in a safe environment (and also let this man move on from his high school crush, which is also fair because let’s be honest he NEEDS to let go of it.)
So yeah, this post does put a lot of tropes and kinks into perspective, which I think is important because one’s squick is another’s fantasy, and neither of these people are inherently more/less virtuous/problematic for liking or disliking it. Fiction is fiction. Real life is real life. What is cool in a book isn’t necessarily what you’d like to experience irl and vice versa, and it’s good to bear in mind that people’s experiences are different than yours and their takeaway from a piece of media might be different from yours.
This reminds me of that deep dive post about the Labyrinth and how it came out in a time when girls weren’t supposed to like anything to do with sex. Yet here is an attractive older gent offering to give you everything and be your slave if you say yes and run away from your crappy family
i love stardew modders fr
In the kitchen straight up "chopping it". And by "it" haha well. Let justr say. My vegetble
So I was telling my dad about neko atsume and he just scoffed and said “you don’t need a damn video game for that” and went out to our backyard and put apples and pears all around our yard and now we’re just watching the squirrels come and go and he’s naming them all after old military generals
