the older i get and the closer i am to reaching 30, the more the people around me try to deny me my age. it’s a constant ‘oh you’re just turning 29 again teehee 🤭’ or ‘dont tell your SO that, he’ll leave you for a younger model 😉’ and i just???? hate it?????????

i spent my entire teenaged years fighting for my life. i crawled through the deepest pits of my depression to cling to the promise of a life beyond that pain. i was so convinced that i was going to die young, that i would never see the grace of my age starting with a 2, let alone 3.

so im going to turn 30, and there’s not a damn thing anyone can do to stop me from loving it.

this post was up for like five minutes and already im being told how wrong i am

fuck you, you can kiss my 30 year old ass

You know what? I needed to read this today

Fuck ageism! I'm middle-aged and it kicks ass. Random dudes don't hit on me anymore and I have more self-confidence and financial security than ever. I still think the world is going to hell in a handbasket, but I'm not about to kill myself over it anymore. I've survived some shit and learned that I'll survive this shit, too.

My 30s were my favorite decade. I knew who I was, what I wanted, and how to advocate for it better than any previous point in my life, and it made my life demonstrably better.

You are right OP, own this time! Happy birthday, and may you have many more, equally joyful.

Up to age ten is childhood - I can't really remember much about it. The teens were horrible, and I don't want to go back there (particularly not the hormonal insanity). My twenties I spent trying to consolidate everything I picked up in my teens, but couldn't quite figure out (and recovering from the hormonal insanity). My thirties were the first decade I had where I actually got to figure out who I was, and what I wanted to do with life. My forties I was finally getting a handle on what kinds of things might be causing me issues; I finally got a diagnosis at fifty. Life just gets better the further you get through it.

Peter Dutton got his start as a copper in Queensland under Joh Bjelke-Petersen, and a lot of the time, it SHOWS.

It would be nice if either of the major parties was bringing anything new to the table for the coming election. Unfortunately, the ALP is basically trying to run on a platform of "don't upset anyone important" and the Liberal Party are promising "more of the same, but with extra bigotry and racism. Oh, and nuclear power stations, so we can shaft the Greens".

The Australian media (especially the bits owned by Uncle Rupert and Auntie Gina) have already decided they're going to sell the election to the one who promises them the most (so, the Liberals, especially if they can swing them even more populist and right-wing) which means the ALP has an uphill fight no matter what they do.

I can’t begin to express the difference it makes just that I’m able to wear exclusively t-shirts, baggy shorts, and flip-flops. And the thing is, right. What you notice is that I’m wearing something slightly odd for the weather. What you don’t notice is that I’m not curled up with my hands clamped over my ears because socks make the clinking plates in the restaurant too loud.

Also, as an adult, I can organize how I run the more difficult parts of coping with my disorder for myself. I can pick out writing instruments and paper for myself, keeping a bullet journal, instead of using a school-provided planner that's formatted for an allistic person and a cheap wooden pencil that smudges when I touch it and fouls my hands and needs sharpening and breaks.

I don't have to pick clothes to wear for the day that someone else bought me that have to adhere to a set of rules I never agreed to.

I get to choose my haircuts and how often they're done.

I can say no to things and not elaborate why.

I have autonomy and freedom your 8-year-old autistic nephew does not.

“socks make the clinking plates in the restaurant too loud” is a fucking FASCINATING way to describe multiple sensory issues leading to overstimulation

[image: tweet by pot8um, transcribed below:]

Boosting signal.

Adult autism does look different to juvenile autism, not least because often we have a certain amount of knowledge of our own condition, and control over our own circumstances.

The fact that this is completely incomprehensible to me makes it funnier than if I could understand it

skill issue. i understand it completely

Boosting signal.

(Yes, I understand it. I am an old).

The older I get the more I admire people who are earnestly, genuinely into whatever their thing is. I know it sounds like an annoying cliche but unless you're being cruel or hurtful there is really no need to be normal about things. The dude with the bad fake accent at the renaissance faire is having the time of his life. The people having photoshoots with their fashion dolls are loving it. The old lady with a yard unreasonably full of tacky ass lawn ornaments is having a blast, HOA be damned.

Don't waste your time being too cool to have fun, y'know?

Speaking as a 33yo anime fan, please take this and sit with it and put it into your heart, because it is true:

That shouldn't be scary. It should be comforting. The thought that you'll always have a hobby, you'll always find joy in the stories you love and find new ones to love and new friends to love them with you is a blessing.

I'm serious. Let go of your worries. Fandom has always been a place for adults. It's only in recent years that younger people have decided it belongs to them, that they've got an entitlement to the institutions and customs and events that were built upon decades of fannish community, with no thought to how they got there or who came before or who is still here, now, making it happen.

You're 21. You've got many, many years of life ahead of you and the idea that you've got some kind of expiration date after which you're no longer allowed to be a human with interests is common and people will say it to you over and over, but it's bogus and you don't have to listen to them.

At least one of the more important things you learn as you grow up is at some point, you have to accept that sometimes, "what everyone else says" is wrong, wrong, wrongitty wrong. Your peers are not always the fount of all knowledge - sometimes, they're just a group of confused people re-circulating the same tired ideas because they don't want to feel out of step.

As you get older, you'll find the opinions of your peers stop mattering as much as they do at present - in much the same way the opinions of your parents start to fade in importance as you reach your teenage years. Over time, you'll learn more about who you are as a person, and what that person wants, thinks, likes and dislikes, and if you're lucky, you'll be in a situation and with company which allows you to grow more into who you actually are, rather than who someone else wants you to be.

If this person turns out to still like anime in their thirties? That's great! It's not like the stuff comes with an expiry date, after all. A good story is still a good story, even when you've aged out of the marketing demographic it was aimed at (or never had a chance to age into it). I have no doubt there are a lot of anime fans in their thirties and forties just waiting for their kids to grow up to the age where they'll be old enough to have these stories shared with them; and another contingent in their fifties and sixties planning on sharing things with their grandchildren; and looking forward to the things their kids and grandkids share with them in return.

The amount of shitty news coming out this week made me feel like this needed to be said, so.

For all the boys and young men currently afraid that being male means some kind of moral death sentence: the same world that produced Neil Gaiman and Donald Trump also produced Levar Burton, Steve from Blues Clues, and my (step)dad, who isn't famous but did look at a deeply traumatized child with a bunch of mental health issues and said "is anybody going to support that?" and then didn't wait for an answer. There are good men out there doing good work in ways both big and small. Choose to use your strength to help rather than hurt, your voice to speak for those who must be silent, and you can be one of them.

Be the man Mister Rogers knew you could be. He wasn't wrong very often, and he believed you could do wonderful things. I do too.

(Anyone clowning on here will summarily get their ass kicked and their blog blocked. Pain is pain and I know there are a lot of scared teenagers right now.)

@king-of-the-dots your tags should be on here too.

May your grandfather's memory be for a blessing, and a reminder and inspiration to us all of what we can be when we choose to be our better selves.

GNU my uncle Leo Bachle, science educator and fisherman, who let me take any books from his library I wanted to read. And he brought a lot of his library in their Airstream when we went camping for a month every summer. He was such a good teacher, and his enthusiasm about the world and science is still contagious in me forty five 😭 years later

I'll reblog with another kind good man every time I see this post.

Me too. May his memory be for a blessing.

Let me add two of my history teachers, Mr. White and Mr. Wible, who by their powers combined made me the insane history nerd I am today. Mr. White was the first person I ever saw teach the story of Jesus as "we're not debating his theology, we're talking about Roman politics in antiquity in the modern-day Middle East" and I was fucking fascinated to discover the story actually had context. Mr. Wible taught American history and he did it with such passion and fervor it was contagious. If you've hung around my blog long enough, he's also the teacher who lived in Mister Rogers' real neighborhood and was on the show once. His kindness and compassion know no bounds (he's actually still around, I'm happy to report).

I'll throw in my dad, and my uncles, all of whom were ordinary, decent men. Dad used to be a church minister, he worked for a while as a field worker and then program director for a mental health charity, but his main qualification was as an assayer's assistant (learned up at the Kalgoorlie gold mines, and went back to it many times along the way) - hard, physical work, but it paid the bills. He worked, he paid his taxes, he looked after both my brother and myself when we were younger - Mum worked Friday and Saturday nights as a midwife, so Dad looked after us on the weekends.

One of my uncles was a radiographer (the person who takes the x-rays, not the person who analyses them); another worked for a land development firm in a country town here in Western Australia. All good men, all hard workers, who largely kept to themselves and didn't cause any outcry.

I thank all of these men for providing me with counter-examples for my first encounters with radical feminism; between the living examples of my father and uncles, and the living history my mother explained to me about how things actually *had* got better for women in the thirty years between her being 18 and me being 18, the whole thing of radical feminism never actually stuck. I wasn't willing to believe "all men were shit", because I knew a number of men who weren't.

People who are doing the right thing don't usually make the newspaper headlines, but there's a lot more of them out there than people doing the wrong thing.

this is probably an unpopular opinion but I think interpreting the doctor as passively evil is an interesting character experiment. like, by human standards they’re pretty much an immortal, ancient, godlike entity. they travel all of time and space, saving or destroying entire civilizations on a whim. they travel with humans because they’re obsessed, almost addicted, to human mortality and naivety. sure, they claim to love their companions, but involvement in their lives almost always ends in misery, and then it’s onto the next. imagine the TARDIS filled with abandoned bedrooms, clothes on the floor, beds unmade, toothpaste in the sink. their things frozen in time, dust-covered and tomblike. and the doctor is drifting through space, surrounded by evidence of all the lives they’ve ruined. anyway, if anyone has evil doctor fic recommendations pls drop them below.

“time lords are friends with each other. anything else is cradle snatching.” she had a point.

... I feel like modern Doctor Who has really given a warped view of how most companions leave

But I mean at this point, NuWho isn’t … new any more. I totally get where you are coming from but saying that NuWho gives a warped view of how companions leave seems a bit silly seeing as we are talking about ~20 years~ of television. After 20 years, that isn’t the pattern being warped, that is just the pattern

Ah, no, that's not what I mean. It's a matter of numbers, not patterns. Let's see, hang on...

Okay, I have used two lists - 'normal ending' and 'bad ending'. With Tumblr's formatting, this is probably the clearest way to do this. Also, I included Donna on both to get both her endings in. So:

Normal Ending

Bad Ending

To summarise, that's 32 normal-to-good endings, and 11 bad endings. Of those 11, only three were from the English series; the rest have all been from the Welsh, and even then, the majority (6 out of 8) are Moffatt specifically, and both of the last two were arguably later undone.

But when you think about companion endings, at this point in time, that's not how it feels, is it? It feels like it's all misery and death and trauma and violation and other terrible things, but in the grand scheme of things, the stats do not bear it out. As I say: the Welsh series gives a really warped view of this.

ETA: added a graph for the visual learners

In case someone's brain works like mine, this is the graph we're mentally comparing it to (made from the list above, with the same colour scheme):

If you're going to count Donna Noble twice, then you need to count Teagan Jovanka twice. The first time, she got accidentally left behind (in the correct time period, at the correct location, so I figure this counts as "going home after adventures"); she joined up with the Doctor again about a series or two later, and then left the second time due to trauma.

There's a reason autistic people can experience burnout due to masking.

Boosting signal

Context and explanations in the tags are always appreciated. To share my own experiences: once I got my diagnosis I started sharing it with my employers. I choose to wait until after I get a job because it has been shown through multiple studies that employers are less likely to hire a person if they are upfront about being autistic.

Asking for accommodations is where I struggle. I am a late diagnosed autistic, and as a result I have some mental blocks that stop me from asking for accommodations at work. Between being raised to be the best at everything I do and being treated like I'm not disabled enough by others, I've never tried to ask. I'm just not sure how to approach it.

I have not disclosed my autism to my bosses, but some coworkers who I am close with. I think something akin to Loop earbuds would be greatly beneficial, I personally got the switch ones. Two posts down from this on my dash was this post by @my-autism-adhd-blog, it's worth looking over for sure.

Good luck! I hope job is able to accommodate your needs!

I personally don’t work or have ever had a job, so will be interesting to see!

Okay, I'm late-diagnosed (didn't get diagnosed until I was fifty) and I started this job when I was 48. But when I started the job, I was recommended to apply for it by one of the staff in the autism support group I was involved in at university; she'd been asked to supply candidates by the project leader (who figured that a disability support organisation ought to put their money where their mouth was, and hire staff with disabilities where possible). I finished up that project toward the end of the year, and a month later I was hired by the former manager of the team I work for; she needed someone who was capable of doing the sort of hyperfocus I could do for another project, and from there I was strongly recommended to apply for my current job by both herself and the Chief People Officer at the organisation. I've asked for various accommodations - mainly around RSI, but also around autism (for example: we have the door to our office kept shut, because our office is at the end of a very noisy corridor, and I find too much noise to be very stressful. To the point of meltdown, in fact). I passed on information about my formal diagnosis to HR at the organisation I work for, because that way, I can justify the accommodations I ask for: I need them because of my very real disability. Still working for a disability support organisation, so I can keep up the whole business of "put your money where your mouth is".

Periodic rent-lowering-gunshots:

Boosting signal.

Also, noting for No 7 on the list: the claim that media consumption influences real-life behaviour is also not supported by evidence. The main pieces of "evidence" for this claim are defence statements by unsuccessful defence lawyers, and deathbed statements by criminals trying to avoid being executed for their crimes (such as the late Theodore Bundy). The majority of actual evidence gathered by academics who have been studying this topic for decades (it's been around in various forms since before Shakespeare trod the boards) points to a much more nuanced picture, where media consumption can influence attitudes, but does not directly dictate behaviour in the vast majority of persons over the age of eight.

You’re a regular office worker born with the ability to “see” how dangerous a person is with a number scale of 1-10 above their heads. A toddler would be a 1, while a skilled soldier with a firearm may score a 7. Today, you notice the reserved new guy at the office measures a 10.

You decide it’s best to find out what you can about this person. Cautiously, you approach his desk. He’s a handsome man, tall, but with a disarming smile. How could such a friendly guy with such cute, dorky glasses be dangerous?

You extend your hand. “I noticed you’re new here. What’s your name?”

He shakes your hand warmly. His gaze is piercing, as if he’s looking right through you. “The name’s Clark,” he says. “So, how long have you worked for the Daily Planet?”

This one wins.

It’s been a few weeks, and one of Clark’s friends shows up.  She’s pretty and all, enough muscle that she must work out.  First thought would be that she should be maybe a 6.

Clark’s introducing her around.  “This is my good friend, Diana, she’s in from out of town.”

You blink, and take a step back in fear.  You’ve never seen an 11 before.

The day Bruce Wayne shows up for his long promised interview with Lois Lane, you can’t help it, the mug your holding drops from your fingers and sends a shock of hot coffee and ceramic shards across the floor.

Clark stops a few feet away and squints at you worriedly from behind those ridiculous glasses you’re 99% sure he doesn’t actually need, and asks tentatively, “Everything all right?”

You ignore him in favor of staring at the inky dark numerals hovering over the beaming fool gesticulating some fantastic yacht story for a gaggle of secretaries and minor columnists.

That’s it. Your gift has officially gone haywire. There is no other explanation. Because there is absolutely no way that Brucie Wayne is a 10.

At this point, you’ve seen it all. Miled manner reporters and billionaires at a 10 and a model-like woman at 11. You were really starting to doubt your power. The day you really stopped believeing in it was when Bruce Wayne came for another visit, and this time with a kid. The kid couldn’t be more than 10 years old, a bit on the short side.

He was an 8.

The day you started believing in it again was when you saw on tv the formation of something called the justice league.

There were those same numbers over superman, batman, wonder woman and robin. That’s when you put two and two together. You wonder how nobody at the daily planet noticed that Clarke was Superman with glasses. You wonder why you didn’t notice. You wonder why nobody put two and two together that Diana Prince and Wonder Woman looked exactly the same. You look in the mirror as the realization hit you and you see your own number change from a 3 to a 9.

I don’t think I’ve ever actually reblogged this magnificent post and that’s shame.

Boosting signal

I will forever find it funny the way Americans are so scared of "Chinese surviellance" like bro you live in THE surviellance state

Yes, but there's apparently a difference between the surveillance being done by a central government in pursuit of control, and the surveillance being done by numerous unaccountable private companies in pursuit of profit. For one thing, the unaccountable private companies are likely to just sell the results of their (far more intrusive) surveillance to the central government in order to better monetize said surveillance - they're certainly much more likely to hand over everything about you to anyone who asks with a sufficiently large payment involved.

yayyyyyy my homeland 💖and also the best of them imo (YORKSHIREMEN DO NOT INTERACT) (jk please share)

friends, if I can give you one piece of advice for those of you who are new to work, or are about to enter the workforce, especially if you have any sort of office job:

Do not work on your days off.

"But--"

DO NOT WORK ON YOUR DAYS OFF.

Do not work on your breaks

Do not “answer a few emails” on your vacation

Do not work off the clock

Doing this doesn’t reward you with more money or whatever. It rewards you with more work.

Believe it or not, until quite recently it used to be *literally impossible* to do almost any office work on your vacation, especially if you were traveling, but somehow humankind survived and statistically speaking, very few offices exploded.

If your job is so vital and important that you're expected to work longer than a 40-hour week, then it's vital enough and important enough for your boss / upper management to hire someone else to jobshare it with you - for coverage for sick days, vacations, out of hours or whatever. If they want 24/7 coverage, they need to hire at least another four people to roster on for shifts doing the job. If they don't want to hire other people to do the job? Then the job's hours are whatever your regular 40 hour work week is, with a two week vacation minimum per year, and sick time as needed, because there's only you doing it.

This doesn't apply to me because my strategy only fails when I don't have perfect control over my immediate surroundings and routines! Hah!

[image: cropped tweet by SNeurotypicals. full tweet transcribed below:]

Boosting signal

If a girl feels uncomfortable hanging out with you alone, and you get so offended by that, it makes you angry, she probably made the right choice.

I know I’ve reblogged this recently but still so spot the fuck on.

In general if a dude gets angry by you declining an invitation you made the right choice to say no

If they get angry when you say “no” to hanging out with them, what else are they going to get angry about you saying “no” to?

^^ Slight side note: When I was online dating I used to do what so many of us do; set up a safety check with a friend. I used to be really slick about it; take a restroom break or quietly/subtle check and answer a text. Then I realized what a good marker it was to check if I wanted to actually be on this date at all. So at whatever time check in was supposed to be, I would pull out my phone and say “sorry, I just have to let my friend know I’m good”. If someone was vaguely offended, I might stay depending on the convo we had after. If someone was SUPER offended, I said “this is exactly why. Thanks for meeting me, I’ve got to go.”  This happened three times I can remember and the first time my voice was shaking so bad as I said it because, you know. You never know what their response is going to be and he was so aggressively angry I was ending the date “over that”. 

The person I ended up with? “Ah, yay-I’m-not-murdered check. Good plan.” Then when my phone was buzzing later (because we ended up on a five hour date on a Monday night) he goes “you should probably let them know you’re still alive. Do you have to go?” 

 *No woman I was ever on a date with was mad about this. Not one. 

This is just like testing the breaks before driving an unfamiliar car guys, and you do NOT drive a car with no breaks. If they can’t handle “no,” it’s not safe for you to say, “yes,” and you need to gtfo of there so you don’t get run over.

Also, OP I love your url, it is perfect for this post.

Boosting signal

"You shouldn't romanticize X trope" "You shouldn't romanticize X ship in media" "You shouldn't write about X in a romanticized way"

Well-

Why don't you just stay away from your trigger content instead of forcing people to consume what YOU want them to consume?

It's always "People shouldn't write about this" "People will see X abusive ship and think it's okay irl" "People will see this and think X trope it's okay" "People will see this and think doing X in real life is okay" "People will turn into rapists/murderers/abusers if they see rapes/murders/abuse in media".

But it's never "People are responsible for what they consume" "People are responsible for their own actions" "If someone does X bad thing is not the media's fault, but the person's fault for having such bad morality" "If you feel triggered by some content, just block it" "People should teach others what's wrong and what's right instead of just hoping media will tell them murder is bad, killing someone is bad, abusive relationships are bad, etc"

Honestly, if you're a person who uses the word "romantizice" or you say "people shouldn't romanticize [X] in fiction" "victims of [X] will feel triggered with this and you shouldn't write about it" you are instantly a red flag for me. I want toxic people and pro-censorship people to stay away from me, thank you.

This, I also consider saying "romanticize" and "fetishize" a bit of a red flag

Boosting signal.

—  - Terry Pratchett, “Straight from the Heart, via the Groin,” A Slip of the Keyboard (via thelonelyskeptic)

Discworld Heritage Post

Reciprocal loyalty is a wonderful thing. Pity so many people seem to have forgotten about it these days.

>listening to nin

>hear a new layer to song ive relistened to over and over

>"wow i cant believe i never noticed this before! i wonder what kind of synth he used. its very forboding in a specific way only nin can achieve"

>pause song to write post praising nin

>the synth specifically keeps playing despite the rest of the song being paused

>look outside window

>garbage truck

same energy

la classique

Bamboozled again by the beauty that exists everywhere in the world if you listen!!!

I bet you could listen to that for at least 4 minutes and 33 seconds