So, I Guess That I, Too, Will Partake In This Great Tradition Called "Doing A Presentation For Class

Really feeling tempted to sign up for the "You're a crew member of the Demeter" LARP in the baltic sea rn.

i know we're all sick of self-care being a marketing tactic now, but i don't think a lot of us have any other concept of self-care beyond what companies have tried to sell us, so i thought i'd share my favorite self-care hand out

brought to you by how mad i just got at a Target ad

Plenty of highly intelligent people end up getting sucked in to cults because they just wanted people to hang out with. There are antivaxxer nurses. Your ability to act on empirical reason breaks down fast if your social and emotional needs aren't being met.

14 year old me wondering why the YouTube results for WTC are all about 9/11

I was today old when I discovered WTC means "World Trade Center" and not only "What The Cut"

Just want to thank Good Omens and Our Flag Means Death for providing middle aged representation. The majority of the actors are over 40 and portray characters who are fierce, vulnerable, silly, passionate, complex, and sexy as hell. In a Hollywood world that worships youthful bodies and faces and thinks 25 is old, thank you for featuring a more mature cast. It’s refreshing.

So here's a little thing I wrote for the Cardinal's Blades. I have never found anything written for it but I'm absolutely in love with these stories and this universe :) It turned out way softer than intended, but that's good too! 247 words

---

Saint Lucq enters the room where she is reading. She lifts her head slowly as her eyes trail on the page for as long as they can and he can’t help the corner of his mouth lifting at that. When she meets his eyes, she answers his smile in a radiant way. Her enthusiasm in everything she does is very endearing, but Saint Lucq is especially moved when she’s smiling at him like that. Saint Lucq takes the few steps separating them and grabs the hand that has just put the book away. He lifts it gently to his mouth without breaking the gaze they’re sharing. And as his cold lips touch her skin, he can hear her low and steady exhale. As he peppers her hand with kisses, she reaches with her other hand to take away his hat, and then undo the clasp of his cloak. He stops as she reaches for his glasses, her hand floating mid-air as she awaits for his consent. He nods shortly and she gently takes his all-time protection away from his eyes. Suddenly all is a bit green and the loss of this barrier gives him shivers. Maybe she felt them, or maybe she just knows how delicate this is for him. Either way, she squeezes reassuringly his hands and St Lucq feels a wave of warm gratitude for her. One of his hands lifts to brush her jawline and her smile brings another wave of warmth to him.

Really wish words like “crossdresser” and “transvestite” didn’t get pushed out of people’s vocabulary cause now we’ve got 20yr olds who genuinely believe the two modes of expression are True Transgender and Valor Thief. Seeing takes like “men dressing as women is making a mockery of the transfeminine experience” (predominantly regarding F1nn5ter or celebs in skirts). Like ohhhh you are so right! We need to protect the divine feminine from any measure of mockery. You know what? We should gather weapons and storm our nearest Drag Story Hour and teach those degenerates a lesson.

The split physical/mental model of disability is a lot like the gender binary, if you think about it.

For one, the categories are believed to be discrete boxes when in fact they have a LOT of overlap (consider autism/adhd-related dyspraxia - even relatively mild cases can make someone injury-prone enough to justify owning mobility aids just in case and severe cases can be functionally indistinguishable from any other mobility disability - chronic pain and other sensory issues, the fact that sensory processing disorders can sometimes be functionally indistinguishable from not having an affected sense at all, the mental impacts of traumatic brain injuries, and so much more) - depending on how you graph factors around them (comorbidity, noncommittal nonbinary identities based on social alienation, etc.) they might not even be a "full" inverse bell curve but a pretty well flattened one.

For two, the divide is given power by people's belief in it, NOT by any material reality of its existence - which means it's difficult but also critical to criticize people's behavior about it WITHOUT implying or claiming it has inherent merit; you can't just go around pretending that people DON'T act differently depending on what side of the binary they perceive someone as being on, but you also can't just decide that the the fact that people do that as a general thing means all individual people on any given side of that perceptual divide necessarily have the same specific internal experience, and it's totally alien to anyone on the opposite side of it.

the leftism leaving people's bodies when you tell them making fun of someone's appearance is always objectively scummy even if the person they're making fun of is bad