#nonsense levels are at critical!

[revvethasmythh]

I know this is the kind of fuckery that doesn't make it into animation, but I would lose my shit to see Jester, trying to formulate an excuse for why she is out in the middle of the night when she is under house arrest, say in a breathy, hoarse voice, "Has anybody seen my SHOE that I dropped here earlier?" while Beau drops to her knees to look for the 'shoe', just like the DUMBEST low level nonsense that could be captured in animation

#*chanting* level two! level two! level two! #no for real the nein's low level nonsense is the BEST #they're so stupid and they have no magical items to help them they're just out here being idiots publicly it's amazing #the mighty nein #critical role #cr2e4 #yes another c2 rewatch

[idiosyncraticrednebula]

I really wish some of the actresses who have voiced Disney Princesses would stop comparing their princess to the previous ones and claim how she was the "first" one to have *gasp* independence and strength *gasp*. Have they ever watched a Disney movie outside of their own?

#disney #disney princess #txt #that crap irks me #a few of them have done like paige o'hara mandy moore auli'i cravalho #can people talk about disney princesses as humans and not as stand-in's for “girl power” for once? #this is why i mess ONLY with jodi benson. she is one of the only ones who speaks about her character as a PERSON and not just a vessel for #whatever the hell they want to promote #“she isn't like the others” head asses #shut up #ironically they are actually pushing that “i'm not like other girls” mentality on them LMAO #i mean jodi will actually bring up all of her character traits and praise how well-written she is and now real she feels #some of the other ones only say “she didn't need no man so there's THAT” 🙄 #don't get wrong i respect their work and contribution but man that stuff really annoys me #the guys who have voiced their princes do not do that nonsense. they don't feel the need to compare their characters to the previous ones #only women do this crap. i ain't surprised. it's expected honestly #i mean imagine if one of the va's for a disney prince went “my character was the first one to have a personality” #cuz we all know that if disney princesses have been getting blasted for their lack of proactivity and independence #the princes have been getting blasted for their lack of personalities which is also bullcrap too and that criticism was decimated a long #time ago as well as the princess one #but yeah imagine that #although bruno campos (hunky babe prince naveen) did say that his prince was “different” from the others and it was like uuuh no he isn't #he is cocky smooth handsome tall muscular and charming he is actually like MOST of the princes at the beginning if we are gonna be honest #he just takes it to a slightly more exaggerated level

[fitia]

I love shows that are bad but in the most fun way possible

#fitiaposting #how am I supposed to hate Yu-Gi-Oh when it's Like That #not that you can't level genuine criticism at it for things such as your typical shounen sexism or racism but like #plot-wise. I think you should just enjoy it for just how inherently absurd and nonsensical like trying to make sense of it ruins the fun

[laufire]

the good thing about finding gr10 comic blogs here is getting to read really good meta made by people who clearly love the source material and are willing to engage with it in earnest that sometimes also makes me see things from a new perspective, appreciate a particular plot point / character / dynamic more on some level, etc. etc.

the bad thing about finding gr10 comic blogs here is that they do all that ⬆️ about comic runs I haven't read or even planned to, making them sound so so so interesting. my to-read list went past ridiculous aeons ago.

#like sure. i've only read a handful green arrow comics in my life but i might as well read the 70+ issues in volume 3!!! (they sound gr10) #(i do have a headstart; up until the current run all the ga issues i ever read where from vol. 3 lol) #(wait no minus that time i tried to start various rebirth runs when they first came out but i gave up like. immediately) #talking to the void #my thoughts #my problem as usual is that i like comics #i like reading comics #i like reading stories by authors who clearly love comics #i like reading the thoughts of people that clearly love comics #also i'm realising this might read as a ''pls no negativity!!!!!1'' post and lol no #i'm all for snark and fandom wank and criticism and BRUTAL criticism of canon (as well as fandom's behaviours) #but i also don't get engaging with media you don't ever ENJOY DEEPLY to this level of fandom attachment #i'm in this playground because i'm having a fucking blast #yes even when i'm being bitchy #(sometimes even more when i'm being bitchy xDD) #fandom nonsense #dc #dc comics #dc thoughts

[allaganexarch]

can't decide if i actually feel fine enough to go to my fitness class or if that will kill me LOL--i think probably i'll feel better if i go

#idgaf levels are reaching critical mass but it makes me weirdly easy to manage #wake up deeply apathetic like 'yeah ig going to class would be marginally better than not going' #personal #grad school nonsense

[avelera]

PSA: You should question news articles that make you not want to vote

Hey Tumblr friends, but especially young Americans in this, the year of our Lord 2024.

Unfortunately, it is an election year.

Unfortunately, a US election year becomes everyone's problem, and yes everyone else, we are very very sorry that you have to deal with our nonsense.

But in all seriousness, the level of propaganda that's going to be flung around on all sides is going to reach peak levels this year for the English-speaking internet in particular. There's going to be a lot of influence operations, on all sides, and yes including on sides you agree with but they are still influence operations.

Source: I am speaking as a cybersecurity professional who also did a great deal of work in election security.

So, here's what I am going to ask you to do. What I am going to beg you to do: be careful of any article that makes you think there's no point in voting.

That's it. I'm not going to tell you who to vote for, or how to think, or that you should trust or distrust every article out there. I don't care about that. I care about whether or not it makes you think you shouldn't vote.

A lot of influence operations are about making you feel like there's no point. That both sides are just as bad as the other. The the election is falsified. That you can "protest" by not voting (false: you will simply not be counted and your voice will be ignored). All sorts of reasons not to vote.

No matter what you do, what you believe, or who you trust, you really really have to vote this year, and every year, and you need to not listen to articles that say there's no point because among those articles are in fact active foreign influence campaigns trying to promote one side or the other for their own reasons, I am deadly serious right now.

(More context, sources, and examples sources below the cut.)

In 2016, Russian influence operations were focused on tearing down Hillary in order to specifically depress voter turnout among young men of color in the belief that this would help Trump get elected.

From the article: "“Buried literally in the middle of the indictment is a paragraph that should jar every American committed to the long fight for voting rights,” Anders wrote in a statement. “The Russians allegedly masqueraded as African-American and American Muslim activists to urge minority voters to abstain from voting in the 2016 election or to vote for a third-party candidate.”

This is the flavor of influence campaign that has been proven, that does exist, and is the sort of thing that does numbers here on Tumblr.

Things like the situation in Gaza, for example, are incredibly fraught situations. Articles don't even need to lie about facts on the ground there to make people feel hopeless and angry. Again, I am not telling you who to trust or not trust when it comes to news sources. But if an article about this event, for examples, makes you think or even outright tells you, "There's no point to voting, both sides are awful, I just shouldn't bother." You need to pause and at least consider that this might be an influence operation. You need to think critically. You need to check sources. You need to think about the world you want to live in, to vote for, and who might not want that world to happen for any variety of reasons.

Protesting by failing to vote isn't a real thing.

Old politicians ignoring young voters because they famously do not bother to vote is absolutely 100% a real thing. It is why so many policies that are popular with young people are low priority for politicians: they are not afraid of losing the young vote because no one plans on having it in the first place when it's never there in big enough numbers to matter.

So please, please, read what you want. Believe what you want. Follow your heart and your brain and whatever other organ you want to think with. I'm not here to tell you who is right, wrong, trustworthy, good, or bad. I'm just here to tell you that despite all of that, whatever you read, you must vote in your elections, no matter where you are in the world and you must not listen to voices that tell you not to as a protest.

#politics #us politics #maybe I'll regret this maybe no one will read it idk

[caffeineandsociety]

There's a specific genre of shitty antisemitic joke that I have seen fly under the radar (as it was designed to) a LOT more often lately - especially since Kanye started going full mask-off nazi - so I feel the need to issue a warning about it. Namely, the genre is jokes that get spread around by people who aren't willfully antisemitic because outside of conspiracy brain rot land, it appears that the point of the joke is absurdism.

As an example, let's examine the 23-and-me lizard DNA test that I've sadly seen floating around unquestioned.

Because, see, to the average person who isn't willfully antisemitic, this genre of joke comes off as nonsequiturs, or hilarious mistakes - you, as a person with some level of basic observational and critical thinking skills, living on Earth and not in whatever batshit mirror dimension conspiracy theorists think we live in, might very well end up getting a giggle out of it because, HAH, we KNEW those DNA ancestry kits were a scam! If you're not a deliberate antisemite but not really up on the dogwhistles, it doesn't scan as anything awful because you're put in mind of things like feeding a photo of something decidedly not human into that one selfie-to-anime neural net, which sometimes works and produces interesting results because the thing is looking for specific patterns and trying to make anything fit - not things like blatantly lying about doing something like that in the hopes that normies who see the absurdity and want to have a laugh at a scummy company's expense will pass it along to people who unironically believe that Jewish people are actual literal lizard aliens and the test proves it.

This is the same strategy that guy at the game awards pulled. You, a person living in reality where the main source of political corruption is just the basic consequence of an economic system that makes power pool in the hands of anyone willing to exploit enough people, a world of banal mundane evil, know damned well that QAnon-pizzagate-satanic ritual abuse cult conspiracy bullshit is, well, bullshit, if you're even familiar with the details of what they believe at all. When someone crashes the stage and thanks Rabbi Bill Clinton, you may very well laugh because to YOU it is a blatant absurd nonsequitur.

Problem is that to someone else, someone who's deep into that shit, it's either someone letting the truth slip, or someone backing the deep state into a corner - whichever is more convenient to believe.

This is one form of how the far right uses memeification (CW: the example discussed in the link is a rape "joke") - it means something totally different to the in-group than it does to the out-group. To you, it's funny because it's nonsensical; to them, it's fun because they think they're onto something huge and they're about to blow this shit wide open and it's going to be their great moment of triumph.

I cannot stress enough that no matter how absurd an antisemitic conspiracy theory sounds to you, there are people who believe it, unironically. There are people who unironically believe that Jewish people are very literally not human and no amount of evidence to the contrary will ever change their minds. There are people who believe that we're born with horns and tails and pointed ears and have them surgically altered to fit in with good Christian humans like some kind of extremely high-stakes game of Among Us. There are people who believe that we steal, ritualistically abuse, and kill Christian babies. These beliefs, while fringe enough that, yeah, most of you who this post is aimed at have never heard them in the wild before very recently, are not nearly as fringe as you probably think they are. Just look at fucking Kanye. This asshole has more fans than there are Jewish people in the world.

So I'm begging you to please, bare minimum, be careful of "absurdist" jokes about Jewish people, especially if they reference lizards, money, banking, or government power. Also, you may see Jewish people debating how religious laws may apply to fictional creatures, but outside of that context you should also be wary of any time Jewish people are mentioned in the same sentence as vampires, dragons, goblins, zombies, fantasy demons, or any number of other fantasy creatures known for greed, feeding on humans, or both.

If the reason it seems funny to you is because you'd have to be really stupid to believe it's true or makes any kind of sense - it's probably looking for you to spread it to people who are, in fact, that stupid.

#antisemitism #psa

[ladyshinga]

I keep being told to "adapt" to this new AI world.

Okay.

Well first of all, I've been training myself more and more how to spot fake images. I've been reading every article with a more critical eye to see if it's full of ChatGPT's nonsense. I've been ignoring half the comments on stuff just assuming it's now mostly bots trying to make people angry enough to comment.

When it comes to the news and social issues, I've started to focus on and look for specific journalists and essayists whose work I trust. I've been working on getting better at double-checking and verifying things.

I have been working on the biggest part, and this one is a hurdle: PEOPLE. People whose names and faces I actually know. TALKING to people. Being USED to talking to people. Actual conversations with give and take that a chat bot can't emulate even if their creators insist they can.

All of this combined is helping me survive an AI-poisoned internet, because here's what's been on my mind:

What if the internet was this poisoned in 2020?

Would we have protested after George Floyd?

A HUGE number of people followed updates about it via places like Twitter and Tiktok. Twitter is now a bot-hell filled with nazis and owned by a petulant anti-facts weirdo, and Tiktok is embracing AI so hard that it gave up music so that its users can create deepfakes of each other.

Would information have traveled as well as it did? Now?

The answer is no. Half the people would have called the video of Floyd's death a deepfake, AI versions of it would be everywhere to sew doubt about the original, bots would be pushing hard for people to do nothing about it, half the articles written about it would be useless ChatGPT garbage, and the protests themselves… might just NOT have happened. Or at least, they'd be smaller - AND more dangerous when it comes to showing your face in a photo or video - because NOW what can people DO with that photo and video? The things I mentioned earlier will help going forward. Discernment. Studying how the images look, how the fake audio sounds, how the articles often talk in circles and litter in contradictory misinformation. and PEOPLE.

PEOPLE is the biggest one here, because if another 2020-level event happens where we want to be protesting on the streets by the thousands, our ONLY recourse right now is to actually connect with people. Carefully of course, it's still a protest, don't use Discord or something, they'll turn your chats over to cops.

But what USED to theoretically be "simple" when it came to leftist organizing ("well my tweet about it went viral, I helped!") is just going to require more WORK now, and actual personal communication and connection and community. I know if you're reading this and you're American, you barely know what that feels like and I get it. We're deprived of it very much on purpose, but the internet is becoming more and more hostile to humanity itself. When it comes to connecting to other humans… we now have to REALLY connect to other humans

I'm sorry. This all sucks. But adapting usually does.

[piratecaptainscaptainpirates]

I do love how Max keeps digging themselves into deeper and deeper shit the longr this goes on.

They look terrible, and everyone knows it. They cancelled a very successful show, one of their flagship properties, a show that has enjoyed a passionate fanbase and excellent critical reviews. Canceling the show was always going to look bad (there's a reason the cast and crew were acting like a renewal was a given for a while there).

And they no doubt expected a backlash, but not to this level. And you can just see them scrambling for any way to make themselves look better now. First it was the intentionally vague "numbers" comment, now it's "ooh we didn't know how to market such a violent comedy" (which, yeah, it's from an anonymous source, but awfully convenient timing, right?). It's just laughable given we can all see how successful this show was, and HBO as a platform has no leg to stand on with the violence nonsense.

They're just so obviously trying to save face at this point, and it's only making them look worse. If only there was a way they could have prevented all of this in the first place...🤷🏾‍♂️

#ofmd #our flag means death

[max1461]

only tangentially related but sometimes I wonder if survivorship bias makes us view modern art as less than older art, that time and cultural memory acts as a natural bullshit filter, that actually people were just as vapid and pretentious back then, but none of the vapid and pretentious work had enough cultural value stick around to be examined now

I think it's partly this, but it's partly something else.

This is probably gonna piss a lot of people off, but I think in a particular sense, contemporary art is just... straightforwardly more advanced than older art. I know, I know, but hear me out: I don't mean that as a value judgement. What I mean is like...

Ok, take math as an example. Math started out talking about things that everybody's heard of: triangles, circles, whole numbers. But as those concepts were better understood, they got abstracted more and more. Symmetries of shapes where abstracted to symmetry groups, numbers abstracted to rings and fields, eventually it was all abstracted to category theory, and so on. And now if you look at major research topics in modern math, things like e.g. the Langlands program, as a non-expert, it often looks like a bunch of fucking nonsense about bullshit objects that don't have anything to do with the real world! But even though I don't understand the Langlands program itself, I know enough math to understand why all the levels of abstraction that I have understood are meaningful and valuable, and I can see why going even further would be too. And math is useful enough that the results often speak for themselves.

So I think contemporary art is much like this. If you read contemporary art theory, you will immediately see that it is all very meta. Art used to be made about very concrete things—people and nice looking vistas and so on—that anyone could understand. And then theorists came along and built up frameworks for thinking about art, because they wanted to understand why that art worked, why it was powerful and emotive. And then new, avant-garde artist came along and made art about the frameworks, pushing at their edge-cases or exploring their unintuitive implications. And then new frameworks were built up to understand that art, rinse and repeat. This account is, as I understand it, a little bit ahistorical—the building and the pushing of frameworks was often simultaneous and often not clearly articulated. Although, frankly, the same could be said for the history of math. But in retrospect I think a pretty undeniable picture emerges.

So, to put it bluntly, I think one of the reasons so much contemporary art looks vapid is that it isn't for you. It's about things you've never heard of, in the same way that category theory is about spaces and morphisms, and explaining that to someone who's never heard of groups or topological spaces is basically impossible. And I think there are some differences—art is obviously, you know, totally vibes based in a way that math isn't. If a big wire sculpture with styrofoam cups on it or whatever doesn't speak to you then it doesn't speak to you, no one can defend it on "objective" grounds. And art isn't useful in the way that math is, so it doesn't demonstrate its validity to people who don't get it in any way. But what I wish people understood is that there are people, who know a bunch of art theory and art history, who that wire sculpture with styrofoam cups on it does speak to. It makes them go "oh, I love how it plays off of X and contrasts with Y" etc. etc. And that isn't going to happen for you because, like, you don't know what X or Y even are! But that doesn't make it valueless, it just makes it insular. Which, you know, contemporary art really is! I think there are a lot of contemporary artists who claim to not be doing what I just described, who claim to be making art "for everybody", but I think if you read their artist statements and stuff it often becomes pretty clear that this is not the case. And this is a valid criticism of contemporary art! But "vapid" is mostly not.

Pretentious, definitely. It's pretentious as fuck.

#anon #navel gazing

[tanadrin]

Imagine one day a new social trend starts spreading. It’s something unbelievably dumb. Not harmful per de, but truly silly to believe. Let’s say, I dunno, healing crystals start going mainstream. Everybody’s talking about their crystals. It becomes impolite to criticize people who believe in healing crystals. They become a big part of people’s personalities, and people on TV start talking about them, and one day years down the line politicians are debating funding for crystal-based medicine. And through it all you are sitting there going, what the fuck is happening. I thought we were all on the same page on this. You want to get along and be friendly and open minded but you cannot pretend to believe in healing crystals, this is nonsense, and when the topic comes up you refuse to lie about it. This eventually starts to have social consequences—they’re that popular!—but what can you do? You cannot pretend a lump of quartz can cure the flu or whatever. It’s just all so unbearably embarrassing.

I think what the centrist/liberal/center-left reactionary turn driven by culture war stuff feels like. And I think the key emotion is probably cringe. Not hate, not fear, though those emotions may reinforce the turn. I think in a lot of cases people who imagine themselves pretty open minded and flexible have as part of their worldview something they thought was bedrock social consensus—on the level of “healing crystals are silly woo”—so bedrock maybe that it didn’t even need to be a conceptual boundary they actually policed in their minds.

For instance, when she started her anti-trans turn, JK Rowling made a big show of not being really anti trans, just arguing that Some People Had Gone Too Far. She wasn’t a frothing religious reactionary, after all. And I believe that’s probably true! I think Rowling probably did have a mental model of sex and gender with a little bit of give in it—of the “we can humor the odd weirdo” type. But as the discussion of trans rights in the UK got more serious over her lifetime, trans people went from “the odd weirdo” to “a recognized minority,” and eventually this ran against a bedrock belief that on some level men are men and women are women and never the twain shall meet. To act otherwise was just too embarrassing. And she wasn’t going to embarrass herself in the name of political correctness.

Other people whose brains have been eaten by the anti-woke mind virus (as @eightyonekilograms calls it) have something going of the contrarian in them, who enjoys yelling “up yours, woke moralists!” or w/e. Im thinking of ppl like Glenn Greenwald here, or Dave Chapelle, people who seem not to feel alive except when people are mad at them. That’s a separate but interesting dynamic. And there are people like Graham Linehan who become totally unhinged through this process of auto-radicalization, moths drawn ever closer to a particular source of validation within their chosen reactionary subcommunity, until they are truly parodies of themselves. That is also an important dynamic, but it’s one that only takes hold after the initial turn has begun.

I think the role of that feeling of cringe, that refusal to entertain an idea because it is too embarrassing (even if it does actually have a decent body of research behind it, unlike crystals) is important to think about, because I am interested in how to get people over it. I know that feeling has affected my own thinking over my lifetime. I wasn’t raised particularly conservative, but I had to learn not to cringe at a lot of feminist thought before I could appreciate it and learn from it. I explicitly didn’t have that cringe when it came to gay people for whatever reason, so it never entered my mind that it might be a problem. I remember being surprised to learn when I was very young that some boys wanted to marry other boys, but my response was “huh. Go figure.” Because for whatever reason I had not picked up that this was something I was supposed to be grossed out by. A general doctrine of empathy, of trying to understand people on their own terms, can help forestall some of this stuff, but it’s not foolproof in either direction—I don’t want to believe crystals have healing powers if it becomes socially popular to do so, just because it is socially popular to do so! And if they do, I don’t want to not believe they do just because it is socially unpopular!

(Obviously the crystals thing is not a one to one metaphor for the trans thing, so don’t read too much into that. Maybe astrology would have been a better analogy. Also I’m not talking just about people whose reactionary turn is predicated on trans issues—I think this dynamic applies to everything from gay rights to the Tridentine Mass. But trans issues are a handy example bc, as the adage goes, somebody posts once about trans people and they never post anything normal again. I think the classic rapid-onset trans derangement syndrome is closely tied to the fact that gender norms are a really deep element of many people’s social-consensus-based worldview, and so challenged to that worldview are felt as really cringe.)

I’m curious if other people who grew more liberal in their thinking over time had a similar experience of having to overcome what was basically a feeling of embarrassment at certain ideas.

[nothing-tolose]

All Because I Liked A Girl.

Part 3

A/N: lol i found this a bit nonsense whsgajdhe *wheezing* AND AND AND IM SORRY IF THIS WASNT GOOD AS PART 2. anyway i love u guys sm xoxo

if you have criticism and suggestions to me, you can just knock my dm or send it to inbox <3

🇵🇸 daily click

part 1. part 2.

Those messages still showed up several times with some different accounts.

You decided to turn on the do not disturb mode so those hateful messages won't bother you for a while before you switched app to reply Ellie's message.

You

yeah

i guess..

You took a deep breath, fingers were typing over the keyboard with hesitation.

You

no

i'm not, actually

can you come over, els?

i need u here

please

delivered

You let out a slight sigh, and you put down your phone to the kitchen table. You buried your face in between your arms, eyes were red and tears stain on your cheeks.

You were actually don't want to give a fuck about Anne's post, but the way people insulting you and the way she reacted to them, you couldn't even understand. How on earth you don't give a fuck with that when some people were saying they'll be waiting your funeral? They might really do something if they have a guts and you were unaware.

And someone was just mentioned your initial there, Anne reacted with 'shh'. What kind of reaction was that?

You scared, terrified even. It feels like you're going to isolating yourself in your home until they forget about the post. Sadly you'll never do that, and you won't and you can't do that because you're not even graduate yet!

You left your phone there, and tried walking to living room even though your feet still feeling a bit limp, you were resting your body on the couch with blank stare to ceiling. Your mind started to thinking about those comments, from the first you saw it to the last you saw it on blog. It scares you, so much. Your tears coming down from your eyes for the second time, your chest were going up and down. You were sobbing so hard. Terrified, confused, all your feelings mixed in one.

Morning felt so long. Now it's 1PM, and you still on the same position with cushion that you hugged for the past few hours. You can hear nothing but your sobs and the sound of cars passing by on the street. Still not feeling any better.

The next second, you heard a knock from your door, followed by sound of door opened. You could tell it was Lauren who just opened the door, sound of hurried footsteps filled the room, "There you are!"

Lauren runs over you, crouches on the floor so that she's at eye-level with you. Her eyebrows furrowed, she obviously worried about you. She tapped your shoulder two times, "Would you sit?" She asked.

You just nod and get up slowly, leaning on the backrest while Lauren put down the cushion on your lap.

"Where's your phone?"

You turn your head and looking at the kitchen table where you left your phone morning earlier, "There," You said, almost not making a sound.

"Okay."

She walk towards the kitchen, her hand picked up your phone without a glance and put it in her coat pocket. You didn't paying attention to Lauren and staring to the front of your sight as you still got your panic attack, but you really really tried to make yourself calm down. Oh, but it didn't help you at all.

Lauren went back with a glass of water on her hand, she sits next to you, "Drink it, and try to breath slowly," You just do what she said.

She put it down the glass on the coffee table after you drank. You feel her thumbs wipes your tears slowly along with her little chuckle. You swore you have no idea if Lauren weren't here, you might be drowning in your tears or maybe crying blood when your tears already gone. Or the worst part, you might be dead alone here. She was like your own sister, who always stay on your side when you're down and when you're happy.

Lauren smiled at you before she hugged you so tightly, her hands running through your hair, "You don't deserve this."

"It'll pass. They'll forget about everything what happened today in no time, okay? You didn't stole Ellie," She keeps saying some words to make you feel better, and apparently it does. You fell asleep with your head on Lauren's lap.

Lauren took your phone out, and she stared at the lockscreen. There's still a bunch of messages request from people who still trying to get you down. Her eyebrows furrowed, anger almost taking over herself.

'All these fucking unnecessary messages, and Ellie doesn't texting her at all while the problem was involved with her? What kind of girlfriend is she?'

Lauren decided to changed the setting to disable the notifications from any social media except messages, at least you wouldn't see those fuckers from your lockscreen notification center.

She turned off your phone and took a glance at your face, she sighed.

'Does she really care about you right now? When everyone were talking shit about you because they thought you stole Ellie from Anne?'

Woke up on the same couch, the first thing you noticed was Lauren wasn't here. You were all alone, lights turned on, it's already dark out there.

"Shit, how long I've been asleep?" You get up, looked up to the clock and it's already 8PM. You grabbed your phone from the coffee tables in front of you, seeing if there's any messages you can reply.

messages from lauren

idk how long you've been asleep but i rlly have to go so sorry for leaving u aloneee;((

i bought some foods u can heat it up, AND dont skip your dinner bcs i assumed you haven't eaten today

dont be so curious to open ur social media, kay? i dont want u get your panic attack again

i love uuuuuu 💋💋💋💋❤️❤️❤️

You laughed for a second, then you scrolled the notification center searching if there's more messages. Your smile disappeared when you didn't see any messages from Ellie.

I mean, she always tried to reply your message asap after you sent the texts even when she's busy, she would tell you that she can't reply all your messages right now and will reply it soon as possible. The texts you sent to her this morning were still delivered. There's even no calls from her, does she even read your messages through the notifications? You needed her so much, and where is she now?

You don't want to overthink it. Maybe she's been too busy, but today is fucking Sunday, how the hell a student got really really busy on Sunday?

You bit your nails, suddenly thinking about your biggest fear.

What if she meet Anne in somewhere?

Your mind straight up thinking about her and Anne. All those what-ifs filling up your head, even you whispered to yourself to not assuming everything in negative way. But you couldn't help it. You really hate it when you can't help to stop assuming things.

You huffed, resting yourself on the backrest. You staring at the wall, imagining if Ellie were here right by your side like Lauren did and at the same time you still thinking if she were with Anne today.

You almost fell asleep again when you heard Ellie's voice calling your name along with knocking on the door. You stood up quickly and ran into the door.

Once you opened it, she grabbed both of your forearms. Her face looked so worried, worried than Lauren. She panted, sweating all over her face, and messy hair strands on the side of her face.

Your hands on her shoulders, "Where have you been?"

She didn't answer your question, all she said was, "I'm sorry, I'm really sorry." And asking you if you were okay, then she hugged you tightly like you were about to leave her.

You ended up on your bed, laying down with your head resting on her arm. After she said sorry five times, you took her to the bedroom. You really wanted to ask her, where the hell was she this entire day? Why did she texted you and just disappeared, and then showed up looking so worried like she was almost dead?

But here you are, with her. None of you broke the silence. She caressed your cheeks so gently, kissing your forehead several times, and humming.

You looked up to her, staring at her green emerald eyes. Your mouth was opened, almost asking her the same question that you've asked before.

"Sorry, I had an emergency." Right before you could ask her, she spoke.

"What emergency?"

Ellie went silent, she bite her lower lip and glancing aside, avoiding eye contact with you.

"Ellie, what emergency?"

She sighed heavily, her eyes now looking at you, "Sorry, you got dragged into this mess because of me. I shouldn't be disappeared for an entire day after texting you," She closed her eyes and looked away, "I'm really sorry."

You sitting up there and shook your head in desperation, "You did answer my question earlier, but you didn't answer the last question, Ellie. What emergency?"

There's no reply from her. You scoffed, "Ellie, what emergency that made you didn't reply to my texts?"

Ellie turned her head, "You texted me?"

"What?"

Oh.. Wait, what?

taglist: @cherryimaa @kimaellie @backedbeansh @bunnyrose01 @bready101

#⋆˚࿔ nothingtolose 𝜗𝜚˚⋆ #ellie williams angst #ellie williams x reader #ellie williams x reader angst #ellie williams #ellie williams x you #tlou2 #lesbian

[qqueenofhades]

I’m in undergrad but I keep hearing and seeing people talking about using chatgpt for their schoolwork and it makes me want to rip my hair out lol. Like even the “radical” anti-chatgpt ones are like “Oh yea it’s only good for outlines I’d never use it for my actual essay.” You’re using it for OUTLINES????? That’s the easy part!! I can’t wait to get to grad school and hopefully be surrounded by people who actually want to be there 😭😭😭

Not to sound COMPLETELY like a grumpy old codger (although lbr, I am), but I think this whole AI craze is the obvious result of an education system that prizes "teaching for the test" as the most important thing, wherein there are Obvious Correct Answers that if you select them, pass the standardized test and etc etc mean you are now Educated. So if there's a machine that can theoretically pick the correct answers for you by recombining existing data without the hard part of going through and individually assessing and compiling it yourself, Win!

... but of course, that's not the way it works at all, because AI is shown to create misleading, nonsensical, or flat-out dangerously incorrect information in every field it's applied to, and the errors are spotted as soon as an actual human subject expert takes the time to read it closely. Not to go completely KIDS THESE DAYS ARE JUST LAZY AND DONT WANT TO WORK, since finding a clever way to cheat on your schoolwork is one of those human instincts likewise old as time and has evolved according to tools, technology, and educational philosophy just like everything else, but I think there's an especial fear of Being Wrong that drives the recourse to AI (and this is likewise a result of an educational system that only prioritizes passing standardized tests as the sole measure of competence). It's hard to sort through competing sources and form a judgment and write it up in a comprehensive way, and if you do it wrong, you might get a Bad Grade! (The irony being, of course, that AI will *not* get you a good grade and will be marked even lower if your teachers catch it, which they will, whether by recognizing that it's nonsense or running it through a software platform like Turnitin, which is adding AI detection tools to its usual plagiarism checkers.)

We obviously see this mindset on social media, where Being Wrong can get you dogpiled and/or excluded from your peer groups, so it's even more important in the minds of anxious undergrads that they aren't Wrong. But yeah, AI produces nonsense, it is an open waste of your tuition dollars that are supposed to help you develop these independent college-level analytical and critical thinking skills that are very different from just checking exam boxes, and relying on it is not going to help anyone build those skills in the long term (and is frankly a big reason that we're in this mess with an entire generation being raised with zero critical thinking skills at the exact moment it's more crucial than ever that they have them). I am mildly hopeful that the AI craze will go bust just like crypto as soon as the main platforms either run out of startup funding or get sued into oblivion for plagiarism, but frankly, not soon enough, there will be some replacement for it, and that doesn't mean we will stop having to deal with fake news and fake information generated by a machine and/or people who can't be arsed to actually learn the skills and abilities they are paying good money to acquire. Which doesn't make sense to me, but hey.

So: Yes. This. I feel you and you have my deepest sympathies. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to sit on the porch in my quilt-draped rocking chair and shout at kids to get off my lawn.

#anonymous #ask #school stuff

[etherealstudiies]

Asking Crewel for permission to date you

listen, I love the trope of dad!crewel, so this is entirely self indulgent

should be gn

characters: Sebek, Malleus, Riddle, Jade, Floyd

Sebek

Sebek had been conflicted about his feelings for you for a while before he would talk to Crewel

It would probably take Silver talking to him for Sebek to actually do something about his feelings

Driven by a certain sense of traditionalism, Sebek would want to approach your “family” before hearing you about starting some sort of courtship. This would be Crewel

I think Crewel himself would be mixed on his feelings in regards to Sebek

On one hand, Sebek lacks a filter and his audio level could certainly be worked on

But he is genuine in a way that not many are, at least in Crewel’s opinion

So while he may be a bit on the fence about it, Crewel would give Sebek his greenlight to date you

Malleus

Malleus had absolutely no doubt about his feelings for you

Somehow, someway, you had reached your hands into his chest and claimed his heart as your own and he wouldn’t have it any other way

I imagine that it’s custom in Briar Valley to ask the parent for permission to court your lover, but Malleus wouldn’t be sure who to ask at first

At one point, he thought about asking Grim for permission to court you

Then he’ll see a father-child moment between you and Crewel and that is when he would know who to ask

While Crewel is one of the more intimidating teachers of the school, I don’t imagine Malleus being intimidated by Crewel himself. What would intimidate him would be the idea of Crewel not approving

As for Crewel, I think he wouldn’t have been aware of yours and Malleus’s close friendship, not because you were secretive about it, but because it didn’t seem like something to bring up

Because of that, he would be surprised when Malleus approached him one day, face set in that naturally serious expression that he has

I don’t think Crewel is opposed to Malleus, but he would be cautious

Malleus is an unknown to him, so while Malleus seems to be serious about his intentions for you, he would keep an eye on the relationship in the beginning stages

Riddle

Riddle hadn’t at first thought about approaching anyone about your starting a relationship with you, thinking of it as a matter between the two of you and not anyone else

He would have overheard you talking about how you would like for your future partner to make an effort for your family. When asked who you considered to be your family, you bashfully admitted that you and Crewel had developed a sort of father-child relationship during your stay

Wanting to show you that he was willing to put in the effort for you, he would approach Crewel very no nonsense

Crewel himself would be very critical of Riddle

While Riddle is a good student, one of the best, he is very strict, and Crewel would fear that Riddle’s control issues would bleed over to your relationship

I think Crewel would want to think about it before giving Riddle his final answer, maybe asking you about how your relationship with Riddle was at current

Crewel would observe the two of you for a while. When he sees how genuinely soft Riddle is with you, he would give him his approval

Jade

Jade would ask Crewel, but more so just to mess with him than anything lmao

I think no matter the answer Crewel gives him, Jade would go ahead and court you anyway

Crewel wouldn’t know what to think about Jade, him being as enigmatic as he is

I think Crewel would be pretty apprehensive overall, probably somewhat worried that Jade was simply asking you to mess with you some way

Crewel would ultimately say no, not trusting Jade or his intentions with you

When Crewel sees that Jade asked you out anyway, he would probably find an excuse to give Jade a detention ngl

Jade would only really get Crewel’s approval once he sees how happy Jade makes you, though it is slightly reluctant

Floyd

Ask?

Floyd wouldn’t even think about it

If he knows that Crewel would want to approve whoever asks you out, he would probably see that as incentive to just not do it even more

When you two get together, he would rub the relationship in Crewel’s face

Much like with Jade, Crewel would probably find an excuse to give Floyd detention

This is a relationship in which you would have to speak Floyd’s case to Crewel, explaining that Floyd makes you happy and that you would like Crewel to be happy for you

Crewel would give you a reluctant acceptance of the relationship, but I think it would take longer for him to truly warm up to the idea of you two dating than with Jade

#twst x reader #twisted wonderland #dad crewel #divus crewel #platonic crewel x reader #twst sebek #twst sebek x reader #twst malleus #twst malleus x reader #twst riddle #twst riddle x reader #twst jade #twst jade x reader #twst floyd #twst floyd x reader #writings

[furiousgoldfish]

There was a time, when as a young adult, I'd be reading self-help books, in order to see if I can do something to make my life livable. Sometimes, these books would go very deep into victim blaming, and making a person believe that they can just 'manifest anything', or 'make things happen', and later I trashed all of that nonsense, but as an inexperienced person, I was all up for magical thinking, and taking advice from people who enjoyed making everything a vague concept that one can control with their mind.

Some of these books indeed, touched on parenting, and their philosophy was that parents who are bad, are simply bad because their parents were bad, which is something they love to use as their favourite excuse (i had it worse). But as a young person, how was I to know this was stupid, I believed this. The book went on to encourage the child, to try and be the parent's replacement parent, and to offer them caretaking and parenting they never had in their youth. Now, if you know how child abuse works, you'd recognize this immediately as the encouragement of parentification, making the child responsible for the parent's well being, being the caretaker instead of being taken care of, taking responsibility for the parent's actions and behaviours when the child has absolutely no control or power over it - basically bad. But, how was I to know, right. So I decided to try and take this advice, and try to see; what are my parents lacking, in the form of having their own parents?

This is where things got funny; I analyzed my parents behaviour, and realized very quickly, that what they lack is moral compass, correction of intensely selfish, irresponsible, ignorant and shallow behaviour, and if these were my children I would simply not tolerate that level of malice. My parents weren't lacking in care, they were lacking in discipline. So at that point, I, who had no income, shelter, social power, access to resources, finances, or anything else, thought I was responsible for disciplining my parents and teaching them how to 'not be evil', if I wanted to change them in normal and good people. (Completely normal and possible thing to do.)

And it's not like I had any guidance in how to offer proper 'discipline', all I knew was violence, which I couldn't do for obvious reasons, and the next thing would be scolding, yelling, guilt-tripping, criticism, making them 'feel bad' for 'doing bad things'. And that's exactly what I had decided to do. Next time my father was acting selfish, malicious, shallow and self-obsessed, I dropped him a 'This is why you don't have any friends.' line.

Now I have no idea why, but this actually got to him. He was shocked for a moment, and then started acting defensive. 'I have friends!' he insisted, and then he started listing all of the coworkers he used for his gain in the last week. 'Those are not real friends.' I decided. That had actually gotten him upset. He started listing all the things he did with those people, which were just random work transactions, and it didn't convince me at all.

Looking back, it's funny because I was so low on his hierarchy of people whose opinion mattered, he tried to kill me multiple times, he screamed inhumane slurs and insults at me constantly, he considered me less than a person, less than a thing even, but he was still so offended that anyone in the world could think he had no friends. What I had done is made him worried that his facade and public image of being well-connected and liked wasn't strong enough, and convincing me that he was all those things, was how he thought he'd fix it. He didn't even think for a second that maybe he should fix his malicious and exploitative behaviour, it was all about maintaining an image of being something else.

Obviously he didn't have any friends, because he's a narcissist, and narcissists don't make friends, they keep prisoners. I was a constant thorn in his eye because I could see trough his delusions and would regularly call him out on that, which of course then brought on violence to make me terrified of contradicting him. Because that's how they think reality is generated, if they say something is true, and nobody contradicts them, then that must be the new reality.

Anyway, I didn't try to argue with him on friends again, because it got boring and did nothing to fix his inhumane behaviour, and I didn't like interacting with him anyway. But I still find it very funny that a book that was trying to push abused children into caretaking for their parents, pushed me into trying to punish them for abuse, it was almost Matilda-like in fashion. If I had magic powers I would have changed these people (into people too scared to be evil in front of me).

#story #abusive parents #bad self help books #mention of attempted murder #child abuse #magical thinking #parentification #abusive father #trying to discipline parents #only to find out you have zero power over them #and it doesn't work anyway

[lakesbian]

💝 for Rachel (for the ask meme)

💝 A headcanon about their love language

yeah these are def just shaping up to be analysis of canon vs. headcanons for most of 'em because we already have interesting canon answers for a lot of these questions but that's ok because that's fun too. this is gonna be a bit messy bc i'm real tired but anyway:

the long and short of it is that she's a dog. she loves like a dog. and i love how that behavior interacts w/ the specific way taylor is fucked up. it is So meaningful and compelling. taylor is for the most part absolutely incapable of admitting or even noticing when something has hurt her, let alone reaching out for support. she's very similar to brian in the sense that people verbally acknowledging that she's upset (generally synonymous with 'weak' in her mind) is intolerable to her, because ignoring and repressing that emotion is critical to her ability to force herself to stay standing & push herself thru the agony to achieve what she wants to achieve. there's this moment during the echidna fight where she sees wards verbally checking in w/ each other and she thinks that she's glad that her team would never ask if she's okay because she wouldn't be able to stop from breaking down if they did.

and the thing abt rachel's love language is that she's Direct About Everything All Of The Time Forever because she doesn't know how not to be. but it's not in a "asking if someone is okay" way, because even that is a level of indirectness, of giving someone the option to say "yes" and reject comfort! she instead directly notices when taylor isn't okay, and moves straight to offering comfort without forcing taylor to experience the weakness of admitting that she needs it. she's not great with words--she frequently feels frustrated by not knowing how to communicate what she wants to communicate--so instead she shows love through simple, blatant acts of physical affection, devotion, and trust. she's the equivalent of a big ole dog that just silently huffs and climbs into your lap when you're sad, and you can't do a damn thing about it because you're getting cuddled now and that's just how it is. she doesn't force taylor to acknowledge the situation to her, she simply notices when taylor needs a hand to hold and very firmly grabs taylor's hand. she's silently, unobtrusively understanding. she sees things as they are, and responds not with social niceties, but with firm and direct kindness. if you start crying while she's sitting next to you, she won't make a big deal out of it, she'll just keep sitting next to you. and that's exactly what taylor needs--affection and comfort sans expectations for her to have any sort of coherent explanation or conduct.

the devotion & trust is also Sooo. auugh. ough. when taylor turns herself into the PRT and she's unquestionably faithful that taylor has a plan, regards everyone else like they're idiots for having even the slightest sliver of doubt in her. during gold morning, when she willingly steps into taylor's field of control, saying that taylor is smart & to let her do what she needs to do. there's this moment during the behemoth fight that i think a lot about where rachel says "you have a plan" in response to taylor, y'know, having a plan, and taylor sort of confusedly reads it as smug & then satisfied without really grasping why. and the reason why is that rachel has put up with so much social bullshit she doesn't understand--the way the undersiders interact w/ her, coil, the prt--and taylor, without fail, has made things make sense. she's the only undersider to successfully speak to rachel on terms she fully understands, the one to kill coil, the one who soundly trounces the heroes every time. whenever things are confusing or scary or nonsensical, taylor, smart and strong taylor, fixes them with her plans. the earth is cracking and coming apart around them, because There's A Fucking Kaiju, but it's okay, because taylor is there, and rachel knows taylor will always make sure things turn out alright. genuinely doglike levels of unquestionable devotion, where there are ways she understands taylor more intimately than anyone else on the planet, and there are ways she can never understand taylor, but she still unquestionably trusts her enough to place her life in her hands. taylor even remarks that rachel trusts her too much when she steps into her radius during gold morning--and the reason that rachel trusts her too much is because she trusts like a dog trusts their person. i've seen ppl say that taylor is rachel's dog, but no, rachel is 100% taylor's dog. she loves that girl like a dog would. it rocks. autism forever.

#ask #parahumans #scarf don't look #worm spoilers