i dont claim to be an expert on love but i think theres something to like… ok so my girlfriend got undertale on the switch a while back, right? and she’s definitely not a bad videogamer but it takes practice yknow, esp when youre doing a neutral route and actually fight stuff. so when she got to the hardest bosses i took the controller and beat them for her. not because she couldn’t, but because i love her. and that’s what my brother did when i was a kid playing sonic adventure 2 or whatever, not because i was dumb but because he was good at it and he loved me. and when i want my girlfriend to read something (a post, an essay, a novel) but she’s too tired to actually read so it i read it to her and i do silly voices and she laughs and we have more fun that way. when you hand a water bottle to your friend and they open it without you even having to ask. when you spent a million years fixing the flat tire on your bike and then your dad just takes the tools and does it for you. its not a judgement, it’s just a service. you could do it yourself, but why should you have to when you are loved?

What's your embarrassing trek related story, I'll start. I actually thought, until not that long ago, that root beer wasn't a real thing and they invented it in ds9. I thought it was supposed to be an Earth thing but from the future. I wasn't until "Mug Root Beer" became a meme like a year ago that I realised it actually existed LMAO

Americans in my notes being like "whaaat where do you live" well it's not my fault you didn't include root beer in the marshall plan

the reason why Barbie (2023) will work as a movie and as a feminist piece is because Greta Gerwig actually also knows how to write complex, funny and interesting male characters. her Laurie in Little Women was kind and fun and authentic in a way that made the audience understand what the girls see in him; the guy from Lady Bird (yes, Timothée Chalamet again) was a really cool twist on the douchebag archetype. like there's no way Barbie will be about how all the Kens suck (and from the new trailer i believe it's also going to focus on Barbie' self-actualization which, god I'm so excited for Greta to make me cry in a Barbie movie!)

Becoming: Part Two, 2.22

listen to me. listen. your actual job in life, and it sucks that your 5th grader teacher didnt explain this adequately enough, is to ask for help when you need it and to accept charity when it would take a weight from your shoulders. Otherwise you end up like Sisyphus- or even worse, Walter White

previous tags, the visibility of this post is geared towards my specific neurodivergencies/disabilities. It is easiest for me to read and process words when they have varying visual textures. I'm about to start blocking people who make fun of that.

Learn to change or seal your fate

Some important things about asking for help:

1) You are asking, not demanding. You are giving the person the choice to help you or not, and you must both trust them to be able to judge their own ability to take the load, and accept if they are not able to. If someone refuses when you ask for help, it doesn't make either of you wrong, it is both of you taking care of your needs.

2) When people ask you for help, take a moment to ask yourself honestly if you have the ability to help them at the moment without harming yourself. If you are not in the position to help the other person, it is ok to say no. It doesn't make you a bad person, or a bad friend, to recognise your own limits and stay within them.

So yes, ask for help. Trust others to judge their own capacity to help, and judge your own before agreeing to help others. That way we all take what load we can manage and share the ones we cant on our own, and no one becomes over-burdened.

sending love out tonight to everyone who is progressively losing their abilities, whether that's movement, ability to walk, eyesight, or hearing.

it's hard to come to terms with the fact that you can't do things that you used to be able to do. I'll be honest, it feels like you're losing control of your life. it can feel very isolating and hopeless. its scary and overwhelming, and it's so hard to deal with.

you are not less than just because you can do less. im proud of you for still being here, and i wish you ease with adjusting to new ways of life. please take care of yourself, i love you.

gentle addition for the folks who are losing their mental capacity in any way, shape, or form. If you can’t think as clearly as you used to, if you don’t have the executive functioning you once had, if your memory is getting worse, if your sensory processing issues are increasing, if your episodes are becoming more frequent. Your life has inherent value and I hope I can help remind you of that.

I do have a piece of writing advice, actually.

See, the first time I grew parsnips, I fucked it up good. I hadn't seen parsnips sprouting before, right, and in my eagerness I was keeping a close eye on the row. And every time I saw some intruding grass coming up, I twitched it right out, and went back to anticipating the germination of my parsnips.

But it turns out parsnips take a bit longer than anything else I'd ever grown to distinguish themselves visually. It's just the two little split leaves, almost identical to a newly seeded bit of kentucky bluegrass when they first come up, and they take a good bit to establish themselves and spread out flat before the main stem with its first distinctive scallopy leaf gets going.

I didn't get any parsnips, not that year, because I'd weeded them all out as soon as they showed their faces, with my 'ugh no that's grass' twitchy horticulture finger.

The next year, having in retrospect come to suspect what had happened, I left the row alone and didn't weed anything until all the sprouts coming up had all had a bit to set in and show their colors, and I've grown lots of parsnips since. They're kind of a slow crop, not a huge return, but I like them and watching them grow and digging them up, and their papery little seeds in the second year, if you don't harvest one either on purpose or because you misjudged the frost, so it's worth it.

Anyway, whenever I see someone stuck and struggling with their writing who's gotten into that frustration loop of typing a few words, rejecting them, backspacing, and starting again, I find myself thinking, you gotta stop weeding your parsnips, man.

the issue with the dishes and getting rid of leftovers in the fridge and so on is that Well you dont want to do it because it sucks and is gross. so you can avoid it for a while. but watch out! because now its worse

the fucked up thing is how "Creep" by Radiohead will really get your ass if you hear it at the wrong time. that shit can be stupid and overdramatic or it can have the weight of an atomic bomb dropped on your heart it just depends

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Characters: Nog (Star Trek) Additional Tags: War, Missing Scene, Dominion War (Star Trek), Loss of Innocence, season 5, Canon Compliant, Ficlet, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD Summary:

“You’ve fulfilled your field studies requirement,” the Superindenent states. “There’s no special incentive for you to stay off-world.”

“I’m aware of that, sir. But the way people are talking here makes it sound like a war is imminent.”

The Superintendent smirks. “That’s the way people are talking here, too.” Her face falls. “If a war with the Dominion does come, you are aware that Deep Space Nine will be on the front lines, aren’t you?”

Nog makes a request of Academy Command with implications he cannot yet understand.

——————–

Not mine but I like to rec good fics outside of the garashir tag zone. This one is short but it packs a punch!

Thanks for the reblog, @sapphosewrites!!!

if i accidentally ran across Deliver Us on spotify and then subjected myself to listening to the soundtrack on repeat for five hours, i think it is only fair that you do too.

you know what, i am right and im tired of pretending i am not

i posted some thoughts about this on mastodon last month

frankly i just think a lot of the discourse on steven universe was and remains shortsighted and childish. a lot of viewers and critics just stubbornly refuse to take the conditions of a production into consideration whatsoever. which, you know, i can understand that as a casual viewer of media, you don’t have that full context you just have the show. but when you get outlandishly vitriolic, as many online critics love to do, a lot of the time you just end up making villains of creators who most likely agree with you on a lot of the stuff you’re criticizing because *the studio forced them to put that shit in and would sue them to hell and back if they admitted to that fact.* i’ll never forget that like three hour “steven universe sucks” video where the critic in question just straight up personally yelled at rebecca sugar over the network’s release schedule, as if she had any control or input on that whatsoever!

at a certain point this level of projected auteurism transitions seamlessly into abject illiteracy. it’s a mode of criticism which treats art as if it emerges from a vacuum, as if artists working within any mainstream media machine have absolute creative control of what makes it onto the air. this critical mode gives endless, endless cover for exploitative censorious media corporations who force talented artists to work under the most untenable of conditions.

why do we care about this? what is it that we really care about? everyone wants the art to be good, but comes at it from an astonishingly naive perspective that corporations absolutely encourage. because if all responsibility for the work falls on the author’s head regardless of how many suits put themselves between the author and the finished work, then the suits just get to keep on doing what they’re doing. this is how we get marvel movies halfway through production before a script has even been written, how we get exploitative minirooms that refuse young screenwriters the long-term career experience of tv writers rooms past, how we get an environment where queer artists pushing boundaries in indie spaces with no financial or institutional support face infinitely more scrutiny with MUCH higher stakes than anything that actually has a real impact on the world at large.

that steven universe exists at all is a miracle. that it’s as queer as it is, and as nuanced as it is about queer family dynamics, mourning, trauma, forgiveness, is something worth celebrating. that doesn’t mean you have to watch it or like it! as cj the x would say, was it bad? or did you just not like it? increasingly i wish everyone watching things would learn to distinguish between the two, and would learn in general that no amount of criticizing mass media will ever ever ever ever result in Things Actually Changing. you want media to get better? then your enemy is the studios, and your allies are the exploited workers who are just as frustrated as you are! putting all that energy into hating A Director or Actor or Property is, most of the time, a gift to the capitalists.

Also regarding the ending, like.

This is a kid's show. I know you can do a fair amount more nuance than some people expect on a kid's show, but it is, ultimately, a kid's show. A kid's show that is trying to express the idea that compassion and communication are powerful tools of conflict resolution. So of course the show ended with speaking with compassion to the big bad and that opened her eyes and everything got better. (not happy ever after, but notably better.)

grom losering

New fic!

cw: PTSD, compulsions, mentions of death

Rating: T

Word count: 1134

Summary:

The list of casualties from the Battle of Wolf 359, just a week ago, stares back at them. Picard had been working his way through each name, forcing himself to view each portrait, but the sheer quantity of them meant that it was hardly a feat that could be completed quickly.

“Captain,” Troi whispers. “Why…?”

“11,000 dead because of me; I ought to at least know their names, wouldn’t you agree?”

Moral obligation turns to compulsion, over the years.

just thinking about this piece a lot, in light of the most recent episode of ST: Picard

especially this line:

"By the time he finds himself as a somewhat unwelcome guest on Shaw’s Titan, Picard can scarcely remember a time when Locutus and his ghosts were not just beneath his skin."

New fic!

cw: PTSD, compulsions, mentions of death

Rating: T

Word count: 1134

Summary:

The list of casualties from the Battle of Wolf 359, just a week ago, stares back at them. Picard had been working his way through each name, forcing himself to view each portrait, but the sheer quantity of them meant that it was hardly a feat that could be completed quickly.

“Captain,” Troi whispers. “Why…?”

“11,000 dead because of me; I ought to at least know their names, wouldn’t you agree?”

Moral obligation turns to compulsion, over the years.

just thinking about this piece a lot, in light of the most recent episode of ST: Picard