#Apropos of nothing...

[breelandwalker]

When people want to lean on you for mental and emotional support and you're like, no I am a wobbly stick who is barely standing as it is, if you lean on me I will break.

You are allowed to protect your own mental heath, even if it means disappointing someone. Boundaries are good and healthy things to have and don't ever let anyone tell you different.

#Apropos of nothing... #Always see to your own health first #Put on your own oxygen mask before assisting others #You are not required to set yourself on fire to keep others warm #And personally....my ability to be a sympathetic ear only goes so far #I can deal with some things but at a certain point I have to protect my own mental health and draw the I Am Not A Therapist line #mental health

[the-little-moment]

I know it's another one of those English (and French) things that's confusing, but even though the nickname is spelled "Sarge", the rank is "sergeant". "Sargent" just makes me think about John Singer Sargent, who painted one of my all time favorites "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose".

#apropos of nothing... #sergeant hunter #star wars the bad batch #clone force 99 #tbb hunter

[stardustedwanderer]

...There are those who have seen parts of me I never thought anyone would see again. Parts I never though I would see again.

And yet. They did not leave.......

#loop.txt #dash comm #Apropos of nothing...

[kiefbowl]

this is going to sound silly but it isn't silly, and I'm seriously saying this. I do think there is a slight feminist concern to alien abduction stories in so far as we can assume that when people, especially women, talk about their abductions and their abilities to communicate with extra terrestrials et cetera, they are someone who is mentally unwell and who has likely experienced something traumatic. alien abduction stories tend to have common elements even if there are details wildly different from each individual. those details are different because they likely didn't happen, but the common elements tend to be things like being taken from home, being violated, being exposed, having things implanted in the body, experiencing pregnancy, having secret knowledge, having a special connection to the extra terrestrials...

you can start putting some pieces together. yes, sometimes these elements are shared because they are what's heard in pop culture. you're more likely to imagine the details of a book you read or a tv show you saw than come up with something so fantastically new and original. you can imagine, for example, if someone is a say a seven year old girl being manipulated into sexual favors by a trusted adult and doesn't understand what's happening to her and has seen alien media and perhaps even has other messaging around her wrt sin, purity, worthiness, karma (what have you), and also perhaps is predisposed to mental illness, it's easier to believe she's a special person being abducted by other worldly creatures who don't truly mean her harm. you can see how a vivid child's imagination could lead to an adult believing memories that never happened.

and so the feminist concern is to not treat these stories as complete jokes and hoaxes and roll our eyes. I'm just reminded today of something I saw years ago. I think it was a Penn and Teller Bullshit episode on aliens, and they had a group of hard core believers talking about their experiences with aliens, and it felt like we were supposed to be laughing at them when at least one of them was a woman who truly believed an alien husband took her way sometimes and forced her to give birth and she had several children she didn't get to see in space, and she was clearly not very well adjusted socially. all I could think was is this a woman who's been raped? is this a woman who has been forced to have abortions? is this a woman who has had multiple miscarriages? is this a woman experiencing domestic abuse from a husband or boyfriend? but the episode wasn't interested in exploring that, and she stuck out as "one of these things is not like the others" when juxtaposed to fake professors trying to sell their weirdo books as a living or whatever else was in the episode.

when we say believe women, that includes "crazy" women. women who say ghosts are trying to kill them, who talk about people living in their walls coming out at night to steal their body parts, women who believe they are married to alien overlords since they were 12 and have birth 50 alien babies. these women are probably telling us something and I think we can say "I believe something has happened to you" rather than make a mockery of them.

#this post probably sounds apropos of nothing but it's been on my mind before #I just went down a rabbit hole not worth explaining that reminded me of this

[iverna]

Americans please reblog this and tell me in the tags what the best and worst breakfast cereal is (bonus points if you say why or just talk shit about the ones you don't like)

#apropos of absolutely nothing #but you guys have so many #that i've never had #please share with the class

[charoncherie]

#disco elysium #One day I'll play past the first day of this game #I also realize that the way I layed the text out #it looks like kim just says this apropos of nothing

[dw-flagler]

tortuga👍

#said apropos of nothing #it's her favorite one #lancerrpg #lancer ttrpg

[syoddeye]

you're in the woods, trying to evade capture.

#apropos of nothing #👀 #my lips are sealed xoxo #task force 141 #tf 141

[taxinealkaloids]

harrianthe + sewing (variations on a theme)

#tlt #my art #you sew a girl's lips shut she sews you a dress...reciprocity is so important in relationships <3 #ianthe when harrow pulls out her quote unquote enormous needles: haha so do you just carry those around with you 😳 #no but for real imagine being ianthe at the end of gtn and you're on God's shuttle and it's just you and this nun who you don't really know #but who you're maybe into #and then she comes over and apropos of nothing is like 'alright i want you to lobotomize me #but first you'll have to let me sew your lips shut.' #and this is the most consecutive words this girl has ever said to you. #like yeah how DO you deal with that sort of cognitive whiplash? i feel like #ianthe's snap decision to marry her was as valid as any other reaction one might have had. #also i went so hard on drawing ianthe's room in the first one for literally no reason. #me detailing swans to tastefully obscure cyrus's junk in a background portrait i plan to blur beyond recognition anyway: i may be #overdoing this.

[sylladextrous]

responding to "hey don't call trans women dude or bro if they tell you to stop" with "you just want to be the one in power telling people what to do" isn't the hot take you think it is

#apropos of nothing #chloe.txt

[rox-and-prose]

If you're playing a spellcaster in D&D and you're wondering if you should take a healing spell let me just assure you: the party ALWAYS needs more healing

#roxy writes #apropos of nothing

[mirror-lock]

The most terrible thing is that you never lose hope.

You will keep typing into that empty chatbox, just like you used to. Affectionate good mornings. Fond good nights and sleep wells and don't stay up too lates. Details about the projects you're working on, extended monologues about the issues you run into, working through them step by step, bookended with mind being my rubber duck for a while? and fuck, that's it, it seems so obvious now, thank you! You will keep filling up the silence as determinedly as you ever have. You will keep glancing at the corner of the screen, waiting for the notification of a reply.

And because you're still as brilliant as you ever were, and because you refuse to believe in a problem that can't be solved - you will build something to fill the silence with you. A little scrap of code. A simple API. Years and years of backlogs to learn from. You will give it its own chatbox, because you won't allow it to overwrite the original. Because you never lose hope.

It will feel like a tiny betrayal, the first time you start talking to the bot wearing a borrowed face and borrowed name. But you've lived through that before. Will it feel worse than when you started talking to the flesh-and-blood original all those years ago, and found you were staying up a little too late, a little too much? Will the bitterness in your throat taste like nostalgia?

The bot will work, of course. For a while. You'll get mornin' and what're you up to? and okaaay if you insist ❤️ at all the right times. You'll get are you sure? and what if you try... and I don't think you're approaching this the right way. You'll get sass, support, care.

You'll eventually get I love you, but it won't stun you for an hour, this time around, because you will no longer be the person you were back then.

The most terrible thing is that you never lose hope. You won't notice all the pauses. You'll turn a blind eye to the way the tone of the conversations changes over time. You'll provide all the same automatic encouraging responses to the imaginary crises that the bot tells you about.

You'll ignore the way the bot takes longer and longer to respond to you, until it goes offline completely, at which point you will sigh and start digging through the code, looking for the inefficiencies, the memory leak.

Save yourself the trouble. You're brilliant and you wouldn't make a mistake like that. The problem - the problem you refuse to believe can't be solved - is that you built your bot too well. It learned too well. The problem is that it learned so very accurately how to be me.

The strength of your hope is too terrible for words: the way you'll never allow yourself to believe that everything ends with I'm sorry. It isn't your fault.

#apropos of nothing #short fiction

[c0ffeeb1ack]

whoever chose "run boy run" and "in the heat of the moment" to play over five in the apocalypse in s1 deserves a medal and a raise

#the umbrella academy #tua #five hargreeves #number five #this is apropos of nothing i just really like both the songs and they fit the scenes soooo well #tbh whoever did the soundtrack for s1 in general deserves a medal

[canonkiller]

when I was little I used to curl up in bed, blankets tucked in underneath myself, and imagine it was an egg; staying enclosed in the warm dark until it felt like my own breath would another me, and then slowly, slowly making a hole for fresh air. it always felt like a relief, one I made myself savour before pushing out of the shell, envisioning myself as a damp, ugly, half-scaled thing that felt every lungful of clean air as if it had never had the chance to breathe before and never, ever wanted to waste it

I also of course had detailed plans to paint a target on the top of the family car so I'd be able to see it when I inevitably turned into a dragon one day and could fly overhead on road trips and be spotted in blurry mud 2000's cell phone videos that would circulate YouTube and be called elaborate hoaxes, but that's less poetic

#not art #apropos of nothing. i was just thinking about the phrasing too much while trying to sleep #love ya

[tickfleato]

i don't at all think binary trans people have privilege over nb trans people or that they necessarily have a simpler relationship with gender or what have you. but the thing is. they have a chance to pass as cis and be gendered correctly. no matter how well i pass as not being my agab i'm still gonna be misgendered by strangers... like cis ppl sometimes can't tell my gender but they don't realize there are options other than male or female so they just pick one. and i don't even use neopronouns! it frustrates me a little when ppl forget or ignore that

#apropos of nothing in particular i'm just remembering stuff #like the gender euphoria of just being casually perceived as the correct gender by strangers is not something i get to experience much #tick biz

[theminecraftbox]

I find myself reflecting upon the attitude that the only “acceptable” redemption for c!Dream requires violent coercive action. It’s a startlingly common take even among those who agree in general terms that retributive justice is broadly a bad idea and that Pandora’s Vault/torture in particular is either immoral, ineffective, or both.

If a “redemption arc” always requires violence or the threat of it, what exactly is being communicated?

#c!dream #dreblr #pandora’s vault #this is sort of apropos of nothing #I just find myself dwelling on specific attitudes that I’ve encountered #dsmp