for the love of god, write all the self-indulgent scenes you want. be utterly shameless about including every last fantasy. i know everyone likes to share quotes and quips about how miserably hard writing is, but please please try thinking of it as a joyful act where you get to be a messy human who makes art rather than some pain filled quest for icy perfection.
“authenticity looks an awful lot like self-indulgence but it is the only way to find your true audience”
I have way too much fun drawing Fidget.
((It’s because she’s ADORABLE. Especially in your style, I must admit.))
I haven't seen this version anywhere so I made one!
This flag is pissing off TERFs of course but i am seeing so much colorful JOY from trans lesbians and other lesbians in the notes like I've never seen a set of tags so happy before omg
Goddamn. Okay
stynamo:
vergak:
Goddamn. Okay
Did you have a kid in your neighborhood who always hid so good, nobody could find him? We did. After a while we would give up on him and go off, leaving him to rot wherever he was. Sooner or later he would show up, all mad because we didn’t keep looking for him. And we would get mad back because he wasn’t playing the game the way it was supposed to be played.
There’s hiding and there’s finding, we’d say. And he’d say it was hide-and-seek, not hide-and-give-UP, and we’d all yell about who made the rules and who cared about who, anyway, and how we wouldn’t play with him anymore if he didn’t get it straight and who needed him anyhow, and things like that. Hide-and-seek-and-yell. No matter what, though, the next time he would hide too good again. He’s probably still hidden somewhere, for all I know.
As I write this, the neighborhood game goes on, and there is a kid under a pile of leaves in the yard just under my window. He has been there a long time now, and everybody else is found and they are about to give up on him over at the base. I considered going out to the base and telling them where he is hiding. And I thought about setting the leaves on fire to drive him out. Finally, I just yelled, “GET FOUND, KID!” out the window. And scared him so bad he probably wet his pants and started crying and ran home to tell his mother. It’s real hard to know how to be helpful sometimes.
A man I know found out last year he had terminal cancer. He was a doctor. And knew about dying, and he didn’t want to make his family and friends suffer through that with him. So he kept his secret. And died. Everybody said how brave he was to bear his suffering in silence and not tell everybody, and so on and so forth. But privately his family and friends said how angry they were that he didn’t need them, didn’t trust their strength. And it hurt that he didn’t say good-bye.
He hid too well. Getting found would have kept him in the game. Hide-and-seek, grown-up style. Wanting to hide. Needing to be sought. Confused about being found. “I don’t want anyone to know.” “What will people think?” “I don’t want to bother anyone.”
Better than hide-and-seek, I like the game called Sardines. In Sardines the person who is It goes and hides, and everybody goes looking for him. When you find him, you get in with him and hide there with him. Pretty soon everybody is hiding together, all stacked in a small space like puppies in a pile. And pretty soon somebody giggles and somebody laughs and everybody gets found.
“Olly-olly-oxen-free.” The kids out in the street are hollering the cry that says “Come on in, wherever you are. It’s a new game.” And so say I. To all those who have hid too good. Get found, kid! Olly-olly-oxen-free.
So my mother recently got married (mashallah). And she set up this thing where guests were encouraged to take photos of the proceedings on their phones and text them in to a given number, after which they would be played as a slideshow on a screen at the front of the venue. I want you to take a minute to imagine how this went.
It began just about as you would expect. People taking photos of each other and the décor and taking selfies and having a good time. The slideshow was tasteful. Clearly not “professional,” but nice and personal.
And then people start getting a little drunk. A person who signs their work only as “Moo” posts this masterpiece:
[ID: a vertically oriented photo of a garbage can. A long table draped with lavender fabric at which the bride and groom are seated is in the background. The garbage can is centred in the frame, clearly the focus of the photo. End ID]
Someone at my table notices. “Is that... a photo of a garbage can? What?” We all express confusion and have a chuckle about it. Clearly someone is taking the prompt liberally. But the avant-garde approach to what is worthy of documenting does not end here, and our artist soon enters these submissions into the canon:
[ID: photos of a pendant fire sprinkler, a ceiling vent, a lightswitch, and a door handle. the photos show a casual, non-intensive approach to framing (neither perfectly even nor deliberately askew, &c.) end ID]
Meanwhile someone has uploaded this photo of the groom:
He is sitting at the bride and groom’s table alone with his hands clasped in front of him. I can’t show you his face but he has a bit of stubble and is wearing wire-framed rectangular glasses. I can best describe his vibe to you by saying that he wore this newsie cap to his wedding and this made perfect sense.
Using this photo, someone at our table makes their first few volleys:
[ID: the groom cut out of the photo from before and edited into an empty booth at an empty chain restaurant and an empty movie theatre, respectively. End ID]
At this point, basically everyone except the bride and groom have noticed, and are more or less following the evolution of this guérilla art project. Some people are trying to talk the instigators out of submitting their unworthy photos; others are riling them up.
Moo makes several more of their found object entries:
[ID: a cleaning schedule sign on a bathroom wall; a bathroom sign reading “men”; a digital thermostat; a framed photo of a smiling man, the sign for the men’s bathroom reflected in its glass. end ID]
And it goes back and forth like this for a while, Moo submitting objects (a close-up on the tines of their fork; a mop bucket; a framed fish head) and their nameless collaborator, not be to undone, putting the groom into more situations:
[ID: the groom's head edited onto the body of a cast member in the Broadway musical Newsies, his cap causing him to blend in perfectly; the groom's head edited onto Jamie's head from Mythbusters as he poses next to Adam, his cap causing this edit to be perfectly seamless. end ID]
A further development in the form of these submissions occurs when The Editor invents reappropriation and collage, beginning to edit the groom into photos that other people have uploaded:
[ID: the photo of the groom at the table from earlier, edited so that there are two identical grooms sitting side-by-side: text over their heads reads "Just Married!"; another photo of the groom standing and smiling with a drink in his hand, apparently talking to another groom who is holding his stomach, throwing his head back and laughing aloud. end ID]
Meanwhile, Moo has taken his aesthetic ethos to its only possible logical conclusion:
A photo of a urinal. “Fountain,” Moo, iPhone camera, 2023.
People are now watching the screen even more actively, laughing each time a new silly photo arrives in the stream of genuine submissions. Moo submits a photo of a dented Pringles can seen through a grate in the street outside and a photo of a bag of road-salting ice. The photo of the groom at the table is edited so that he sports a towering Cat-in-the-Hat hat instead of the newsie cap; the groom is edited into an astronaut suit on the moon; he and the bride wearing her fur stole are edited as Jackie O. and JFK in the limo (this last The Editor wisely did not upload but sent only to me).
Not content, however, with editing the groom into non-wedding photos or with sabotaging earnest submissions to the photo album, The Editor proceeds to bring us full circle by reappropriating Moo's recontextualisations, Sherrie Levine-like:
[ID: 1. the photo of the garbage can from earlier, with the groom edited onto the flap that you push garbage through; 2. the groom edited into the photo of the framed photograph from earlier; he has been made greyscale to match the photograph; 3. the photo of the urinal from above, with the groom edited into its bowl. end ID]
The people at Moo’s table (groom’s family) love this last submission ("Urine a Urinal," Anonymous, iPhone camera, 2023). They watch the screen waiting for it to come up again, and when it does, they shout “there it is!” and laugh and clap.
Alas, our destabilisation of what constitutes artistic merit was not allowed to persist. Like the Society of Independent Artists sticking Duchamp’s “Fountain” behind a partition, the bride and groom silently deleted all of the unworthy submissions from the publicly shared album. Luckily, I saw this coming and was able to document the proceedings.
In conclusion, I recommend not crowdsourcing your wedding photos unless you have a very well-developed sense of humour.
always bothers me when "improvements" to unhealthy diets are all about taking tasty things away rather than ADDING new things. like. add new tastes and new flavours and MORE NUTRIENTS and vitamins
there was some awful show on for encouraging middle class mothers to take their eating disorders out on their children and it was like "oh well, this snack doesn't taste as good as my usual one, but it's healthier"
so get one that??? actually tastes as good?
like this thing of. you know this food that you like and enjoy eating? why don't you toss all that out and eat stuff you don't enjoy as much or want to eat?
that's unhinged to me.
like i just think the process of discovering newer, healthier foods should be ADDITIVE, where you're exploring new tastes alongside your usual ones, slowly broadening your palate and your preferences, rather than punishing yourself for "unhealthy" food
(CW eating disorders)
god i feel so strongly about this bc i could not figure out how to strike a balance between “eating foods that make me feel good” and “not relapsing back into disordered eating habits” until i switched my mindset from “i need to remove unhealthy foods from my diet” to “i need to figure out which foods makes me feel good and add them to my diet”
examples:
moving from “i want a snack. chips sound really good, but i can’t eat chips because they’re unhealthy, so i guess i just won’t eat anything” to “i want a snack. chips sound really good, so i’m gonna eat some, but because i haven’t had any fruits or veggies today, i’m gonna eat some grapes with them”
moving from “i’m craving a burger and fries from mcdonald’s, but that’s unhealthy, so i’m just gonna eat some plain brown rice and grilled chicken even though those don’t sound good” to “im craving mcdonald’s, but last time i ate that it upset my stomach, so i don’t think eating it would make me feel good. but i think what my craving is telling me is that i need carbs and protein, so how about i make some steak and mashed potatoes for dinner?”
moving from “i’m in too much pain to cook tonight, but frozen food is unhealthy, so i just won’t eat anything” to “im in too much pain to cook tonight, so im gonna eat a frozen meal, but im gonna add some pre-cooked chicken and frozen spinach to it because i think the protein and veggies will make my body feel good”
and honestly this has been so much better for me and i feel so much better both physically and mentally than when i was just focused on “i can’t eat anything that’s Unhealthy”
I've also found that if I'm DESPERATELY craving sugar or want to eat ALL THE CARBS RIGHT NOW, it's almost always because I haven't eaten enough that day, or haven't eaten recently enough, and my body is trying to get me to pay attention to the fact I need some energy ASAP.
So it can be useful for me to go "well, I just realized I haven't eaten in six hours, so how about I make a sandwich and see how I feel, and then I can ALSO have some cookies if I still want some" instead of just having the cookies and feeling bad and headachey later because I didn't have any protein or anything with it. Sometimes I still want a cookie, and sometime I don't, but I don't get that gross sugar bonk feeling.
ruh roh, it gets worse
I’m not a Redditor so I could be wrong. But this looks pretty fucking bad
Just did some googling, recommend folks do the same. Turns out this isn’t exactly the case; some subreddits have been hijacked and closed by previous rogue mods, and current mods ousted them. Some bad actors are taking advantage of the protest to push their own narrative and claim that Reddit admins are responsible.
That second image? The thread isn’t removed, just closed, and has tons of comment refuting it. It pops up first when you search “reddit admins reopening subreddits”
I agree with the protests but misinformation is unfortunate and happens.
