hello

Since the original intent of the Bechdel Test was more like “can I pretend these women are lesbians for five seconds,” I think it’d be funny to write a scene of two women graphically fucking while talking about men the whole time

Can we normalize doing nothing, please?

I work with kids. These kids are at my program before and after school, and then some of them have sports/dance/music sometimes all of the above before they finally go home, eat dinner, and go to sleep. Then rinse and repeat everyday, and games and more classes on the weekend, etc.

I’m all for extracurriculars, but this turns into the teen who is not only in the school play, but they’re on the newspaper, the football team, and seven different clubs. In college they take double the courseloads, and then once they graduate…what?

They work themselves raw because they arent used to downtime. They’ve been told they can always be doing something, and they don’t know how to relax. This turns into the adult that has anxiety because there’s nothing left to clean, the adult that desperately wants to watch that TV show but can’t force themselves to sit long enough for it.

Then they turn into the moms and dads who spend all their free time ferrying their kids to extracurriculars.

Like, these kids don’t know what downtime is? I told a kid I did nothing last weekend, and he looked at me like I was crazy. He asked what I was doing this weekend and I said “Probably sleeping, mostly,” and he actually gasped. Then he rattled off a bunch of things I could do, to which I had to stop him.

“No, you don’t understand. I plan on sleeping. I’m booked.”

“But you could–”

“Nah. I’m just gonna rest.”

It was as if I had said a bad word or something. I asked what he does when he gets sick, and he says he goes to practice anyway. I asked him what he does if he doesn’t feel like going, and he said he goes anyway. I asked when he takes time to rest, and he said when he sleeps at night.

Bring back lazy Sundays. Bring back Saturday morning cartoons. Bring back the idea of relaxing and soaking in your day before moving into the next thing. Bring back the right to breathe, the right to rest.

Bring back mental health days, and taking a break. Bring back taking a walk or watching a show or setting a timer to remind yourself to stop cleaning and relax.

If you’re running at 100% all the time with no time to recharge, then your battery is going to die spectacularly, and probably at the worst possible time.

Mood

Society is trying to burn us all out.  Tell society to fuck off.

Go take a fucking nap.  You’ve more than earned it and you deserve it.

We HAVE to recharge.  Our bodies, our minds, our everything requires it.  

My dad told me when I was young that the way to take a vacation is to work on something different and I thought, and still think, that that’s the most obscene idea anyone’s ever told me to my face.

>a wild therapist has entered the chat

I can’t tell yall how much of my practice is teaching people - teenagers and adults - to do nothing. To stop. To rest. To turn off.

Folks are so resistant. A lot of the time, people don’t think they deserve it. A lot of the time they don’t know how. A lot of the time they don’t think they’re allowed.

I only have my own experience to pull from. I spend a huge amount of my time on fucking around. Lazing. Chilling. Sloth. It drives my family CRAZY that I don’t care to push that hard. I just don’t. I never have. I love it and I prioritize it. Fuck everyone else. I used to feel bad about that and sometimes still do.

But last night I was at My Local working on catching up on my patient notes so I could have my whole weekend off to sleep late and write fics and recover from the week with nothing more pressing than laundry and the server I’ve known for a decade was like “Keep working hard, it’s what you do.”

And I said “Yeah, thanks!” Because I do work hard.

How much time I take to myself doesn’t negate the hard work I do. In fact? The amount of time I take is why I can work so hard.

Everyone around me is burning out. Everyone. A big part of why is because they don’t feel like they’re allowed to take that time.

Fuck that.

You hear me? Fuck. That.

If your space is clean of the kind of mess that will attract insects and it can wait? Let it wait. You need to rest. Because the rest is what lets you work hard.

You only have so many spoons. You will run out if you don’t let yourself take the time to replenish.

It’s not a matter of deserving. It’s a matter of necessity.

If you do not schedule maintenance, your equipment will schedule it for you.

On April 5th 2063, within minutes of the Vulcan ambassadors’ arrival to Earth, the Wikipedia page for The Fermi Paradox was edited to include the words “was”, not “is”.

Given how fast wikipedia updates I can see that happening. Maybe. Assuming that one of the potential Very Fast Updaters of the future lives in a place with reliable enough internet access post WW3.

There’s a heated argument in the discussion section between people who haven’t heard yet.

The page gets rolled back and then updates again by a guy who’s been waiting for their signal strength to increase and actually got to the page first.

Someone asks if these ‘Vulcans’ are really aliens or just cosplayers, starting a whole new discussion argument.

Meanwhile, on Vulcan, some poor sod has to update their wikipedia-equivalents page on humans, and wonders how to possibly phrase ’S'chn T'gai Solkar kissed the first human to travel at warp’ without it sounding illogical.

Logipedia editor, updating the First Contacts page with an image of The Handshake: computer, render SolkarTheSlut.jpg

Hordes of scandalised Vulcans: delete this

Happy first contact day 🖖🏻

To anyone thinking their writing is bad or “cringey” today just know I am KISSING your stories on the top of their lil heads

Whoever needs to hear this. Please know.

"Closed at 6pm" does not mean "The entry door locks up at 6, but if you're already inside you can keep on shopping."

It means, "you should be finished and out of the store at 6pm."

This is not up for debate

This is just how things work

I just feel like if we just straight up vacuum sealed the building at 6:01 and let bitches fend for themselves Dawn of the Dead style then word would get around

I was making coffee and I heard a "mpeep" behind me so I turn around an on my kitchen floor sits Kotelet, the tiny stray that visits me every day, and to her side sits a big fat house spider, you know the one that gets stuck in your bath.

So I go "Hey ehh, you brought a buddy?" and she looks down at the spider and swallows it in one go -legs and everything- and looks back at me with these cute big eyes

Couldn't get the image out of my head

CRIME SCENE

Yes, Spain!!!!

SPAIN WITH THE STEEL CHAIR???

no one is going to be doing this and even if they were literally who cares. Ouhhh noooo, someone gets 3-5 days off a month aaughh how scaryyyy. Society will collapse aaarrrghhhh.

Do you know how often I call in sick from my retail job just because the vibes weren’t aligned that day? Who cares.

Gender bigots will straight up demonize something that helps all cisgender women on the off-chance that a transgender woman might also benefit.

i hate how much a third monitor would improve my general workflow bc even two monitors is too much i wish i could be happy with one lmao

In your attempt to make the internet a more "friendly" place you made it more sterile and boring than ever

Oh wait this is the wrong post lol

i was like god damn what did i do

funniest gag is when something with an otherwise decent artstyle suddenly starts looking like complete shit for comedic value. second funniest gag is when something that already looks like complete shit for comedic value suddenly looks SUPER good for even MORE comedic value

this is what a Bodhisattva is

Oh, literally!

A quick update for all my fellow r/196 migrants about how things are going back in the motherland. A saga has unfolded:

It began with a basic hornypost, and a comment under said post:

So, the fatal BreadSlice was getting clowned on in the replies, until:

So yeah, the more things change the more they stay the same I guess.

bonus:

I’ve never seen this with the update and it makes it so much funnier

I used to get insecure when reading radical critiques of "born this way" narratives, but I understand it differently now. I'm reading early defenses of homosexuals that concede that their "invert" pathology is worthy of sympathy, and that straight society ought to allow them to have sex (in the right circumstances) so they don't have to be miserable. They go on to claim that while some people who commit homosexual acts are victims of their circumstances, the real perverts are ontologically straight men who commit them by choice.

If I asked every LGBT person I know, "did you choose to be queer," virtually everyone would say no. I have never, to my knowledge, met anyone who would say yes. But if I asked them if they would turn straight/cis if they could, I believe that most, including people who have gone through great hardships on account of their identities, would still say no. The phrase "gay lifestyle" is considered politically incorrect, and indeed there is no one gay lifestyle. But we have also developed culturally distinct circles associated with pleasure as a virtue, creativity, individual dignity and collective care. Many of us learned to look at the straight world not with envy but with relief that we're not part of it.

There are characteristics of our queer identities or behaviors that are a choice. I did not choose to be attracted to men, but I did choose to be promiscuous. I did not choose to be uncomfortable with "male" gender roles, but I did choose to challenge them through gender expression. An emphasis on innateness would imply that the only characteristics of my identity and behavior worth defending are those that are inevitable. It would ask why I still insist on living the way I do when my sexual desires can now just as well be satiated in a legally recognized monogamous marriage.

The subtext of this question, a choice or not a choice, is whether a person is worthy of support. Much like the elusive "gay gene," some trans advocates are searching for the definitive proof of "male brains" and "female brains" that will validate the existence of trans people once and for all. If gender becomes medically or scientifically "provable," perhaps science would then validate trans people. Or, perhaps a brain scan would determine who should or should not consider themselves trans, and create new rationalizations to misgender on "scientific" terms. We need only look back to the sexologists of the late 19th and early 20th century, often gay themselves, who developed scientific rationalizations for queer behavior in good faith only to have them reapplied to nefarious ends.

Many will insist they support LGBT people in the abstract but not the specifics of queer culture. These are the tendencies that don't have a scientific or metaphysical explanation. It is less often we hear claims that one is born to be flamboyant, promiscuous, left wing, kinky or polyamorous, so these tendencies are superfluous. There is a platonic ideal of a lesbian, a gay man, a bisexual or a trans person who follows their natural proclivities and not a step further, and you're not it. So arguments against born this way narratives are not just in defense of those who see themselves as having chosen their gender or sexuality--for what it's worth, I have knowingly not met any. It's that this is a flimsy claim to legitimacy, one that has been used against us, and one that can only be taken so far. I'm not interested in determining who is "faking it." I understand more and more that everyone's body belongs to them, and the steps they take to experience joy and mutual pleasure need no explanation.

I love queer masculinity tbh shoutout to butches and leather daddies and so on and so forth. People with their keys on a carabiner clipped to their belt. You know

The really fun thing is that boyslay is gender neutral like I know a butch lesbian and a masc gay dude who dress exactly the same. And it's fantastic

This is lesbians who dress like Your Dad erasure.

Counterpoint: the masc gay dude could also dress like Your Dad. You don't know. Dadcore is a known subset of boyslay

What many never mention is that most of us have an assortment of dadcore and boyslay clothes for different situations

Diane di Prima

ursula k. le guin, the lathe of heaven

Saw a post the other day that was like 'guys stop complaining about the One Piece tab, as marketing goes it's very unobtrusive'. Do we think Tumblr took that as a challenge or

Nobody was going in the one piece tab so they had to send out the fucking clown

The clown was so funny honestly it's so badly thought out like

1) no actual indication of what he's advertising so a lot of ppl genuinely had no idea it was part of the One Piece campaign

2) like if they'd gone for the hat guy I think a good number of non-fans would have recognised him but I don't think anyone knows who the fucking clown is

3) he's like. Genuinely creepy & uncomfortable? Again like if they'd put the hat guy down there people might have been like oh cool a little guy on my dash but he's a scary clown who leers at you. Nobody wants the clown.

4) he is blocking part of the UI

Another piece I did for The Nib back in 2015! Gonna keep posting these until they shut down at the end of the summer. It was such a treat to hear that Matt and the whole editorial team just won an Eisner for their work on the magazine and website. Much-deserved.

Anyway: this is a parody and isn't representative of every screenwriter's experience, but it certainly feels relevant with all the strikes rolling out right now. Did you know what kind of credit you get on a film directly impacts how much you're paid? For writers you'll see "created by," "written by," "story by," and all sorts of other things, all of which translate to different levels of compensation! (Highlander, for example, has Story by Gregory Widen and Screenplay by my dad and his writing partner, Larry Ferguson.) The Writer's Guild is often responsible for arbitrating those decisions. They have a whole MANUAL to help writers understand the process. It rules.

Thanks, WGA. Thanks, The Nib. (And you can always make more of these comics possible on Patreon.)