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thinking about how as an adult I have been able to meet gay children for the first time (there were no out gay children or teenagers in my town when I was growing up that I was aware of) and how i am noticing new types of best friends develop. my favorite is “tween/teenage trans girl and the lesbian/transmasc/nonbinary afab kid who constantly bodyguards her and circles her protectively” i have seen this type of bestfriends many times now and sometimes i tell them and they giggle and go that’s us !! and i tell them, we didn’t used to be able to be together and now we are. and i am so lucky to be able to see it.
I’m often really dedicated to the visual quality and authenticity of the memes I make, but like idk if I could ever make another human being care about that. I used the proper font and color picked the correct color and sized everything correctly and used the alignment tool to get the spacing right and redrew the nebula background and spent way too long messing with the drop shadow settings to mimic the original text. Skyrim media literacy 0 skill meme. If you care.
Your commitment to craftsmanship is appreciated. Years ago I spent way too long on this stupid meme to get the pull lines in the dark green and the fading of the lime color just right.
at the risk of being cringe with everything going on — this week, the last six months, the past five years — i keep thinking about that one quote from the great gatsby
“they were careless people…they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
It isn’t just that Knives Out protagonists win by being kind and steadfast. They win by sticking to what it is they’re good at. What they’ve been called to do, as thankless and as demeaning as those jobs can sometimes make them feel. They didn’t play the “game” like Benoit did. They just did what they knew they were good at.
Marta wins because she was a nurse and a caregiver before anything else. She wins the inheritance because she gave Harlan companionship, not just medical care. She gets the truth out of Ransom because she acted as a nurse, trying to save Fran even though she still dies in the end. Had Harlan just fucking listened to the actual medical expert in the room instead of himself, he would have lived.
Helen wins because she’s a third-grade teacher—her job is literally educating, caring for, and looking out for kids. Glass Onion isn’t just the working class vs the wealthy, it’s an actual functioning adult woman vs a bunch of adult-sized toddlers, whining and throwing temper tantrums and thinking only of themselves. She plays games with her third graders, and in the end she wins by making a game of destroying everything Miles ever held dear, even getting the others to side with her.
Jud wins because he’s an actual fucking priest, who actually embodies everything his god taught. He doesn’t try to poach Wick’s “flock” or anything, nor does he allow himself to surrender to anger and vindictiveness in the way Wick did. Jud is absolved of all his crimes because he just wants to do good by his church, in the name of his god.
Just as Blanc is an excellent detective, so too are these three spectacular at their jobs.
Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig just keep reiterating the same points in every film and I do love them for it.
• Respect the working class
• Fucking respect women.
• Listen to the local queer person who is excellent at their jobs and you will go far.
One of the big things I struggle with functions-wise is getting stuck in what I call optimization loops. Where there’s several tasks that need doing, and some would be optimized by having another task done first, but it can’t be shaken out into a clear executable task list.
Simple example: I need to shower, eat food, and go to grocery store. I’m hungry and don’t have energy to cook, so the easiest food option would be to get a deli item at the grocery store. But I want to shower before leaving the house. But I don’t have energy to shower without eating first.
It feels very silly to get stuck on such a minor dilemma for as long as I have! But there are times I’ve spent hours looping through this list, trying and failing to start it anywhere. And the only way out, I find, is to manually override it: to catch it happening and say, fuck it! I can go to the grocery store stinky! It’s fine!!
It could be considered a subset of perfectionism, because the override very much involves hitting yourself with the idea that it’s ok to do things suboptimally. But it feels like it comes from a slightly different place. As someone who struggles with executive function, I get myself through a lot of tasks by trying to optimize to the smoothest, lowest-friction way through. The task order that minimizes having to do any step more than once, or having to remember too many things at a time. If I can arrange my tasks just right, sometimes I can get one task to cover part of the work of doing another! And if I can put my tasks in an order that feels natural and ideal, I can lower the energy of activation it takes to get moving. And, sometimes, avoid the choice paralysis of not being able to pick a task out of a list of equal priority.
Except that, obviously, sometimes the optimization process throws up glitches of its own. There’s the closed loop I described, and there’s also another catching point where a task I have the mental energy and wherewithal to do gets stuck behind a task that’s too big/intimidating/difficult to tackle. For example: I just sent some emails I’ve been procrastinating on for over a month, because I need to set up a new email address, and I was telling myself it’d be better to get that set up before I contacted people, because it would save me the hassle of dragging a bunch of conversations over to a new account when I did get it set up. I still haven’t made the other email! But I realized that hypothetical future hassle was not worth the delay of not sending those emails for as long as it’s going to take to actually get my brain together to figure out a new email service.
Surprisingly, doing something like this often actually makes the difficult task I was stuck on easier! Another thing I struggle with is a flinch reaction from tasks that are both pressingly important, and unapproachable to do. The more I need to do a task immediately, the more stressed and overwhelmed and self-recriminating I get about the fact that I don’t know how to even start doing it. It gets so bad I can’t even think about it directly - I think about the general shape of it, flinch, and divert my attention so I don’t panic.
And when I’ve got a minor, pressing task stuck behind a big nebulous scary task, it presses the unapproachable task forward, makes it urgent, and that makes it harder to figure out how to do. If I can get around it, and do the actually pressing task in some contrived way that pushes some miscellaneous messy consequences forward, it takes pressure off the big task. And then I can actually think about it, without panicking, which makes it possible to actually work on doing it.
That last point also often applies to asking for help. I have a weird hangup here: I find it excruciatingly difficult to ask for help if I haven’t at least *started* the thing I need help with. Which gets into the same dynamic: I have a big unsorted task I can’t think about directly without panicking, or the path of steps to doing it that I’ve managed to figure out starts with one I can’t make myself tackle, so I’m stuck doing nothing with no way in. Asking for help means admitting to someone that there is going to be mess, that I can’t tackle the problem in the optimal front-to-back way so there’s going to be inconvenient problems generated in some of the steps that will have to be dealt with at other steps, and some of that inconvenience might be to people other than me!! But just managing to say this, to admit this upfront, is sometimes enough to cut the gordion knot of not being able to start anywhere.
So, ok, it is a little bit about perfectionism. But perfectionism that comes from a slightly sideways place: the desperation to avoid creating problems in the future, to the point where instead you create problems now.
ALT
hope this is okay to reblog - those optimization loops are absolutely my most disabling exec dysfn issue, too, and i often have to remind myself of this comic–ESPECIALLY “get rid of secret rules.” that’s been the most helpful piece of advice for me, personally, largely because it puts into words even the idea that there might be secret rules i don’t even notice i’m following. now that it’s something i even think to check with myself, it has become so so so much easier to realize that i can just Stop Doing That.
funny thing about the 30-50 feral hogs guy is that an ar-15 is arguably woefully inadequate to deal with that many hogs, therere videos of guys driving around in jeeps lighting up fleeing hogswarms with belt fed machine guns and m4s and they only get like 20 at most. 30-50 feral hogs vs one guy with a semi automatic rifle and a few unarmed children is an unwinnable situation. all this to say, artillery barrages are the only viable home defense equipment when dealing with the hogtide
my senior english teacher told me that any scene with a woman in a cornfield in every piece of literature ever is about her journey to womanhood/pleasuring herself in the field and i just…. believed her
found this on twitter about stranger things and the duffer brothers (apparently this is from “beyond stranger things” interview on netflix) and umm so this is… weird to read
there’s a comedian who I love whose name is Josh Johnson. because his comedy isn’t JUST comedy. I sit down to watch one of his videos and I know he’s about to change the way I view something. like he did a video talking about Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl half time performance where he said,
“art can save your life, art can absolutely save your life. I believe it from the bottom of my heart. but believe me when I tell you entertainment will never be your salvation. art can save your life, but entertainment–by and large is escapism. and no one has ever escaped their chains by forgetting they were there. so you, you cannot, when I tell you, you will not be saved through entertainment alone.”
anyway. I just think about that a lot. you can watch the entire video here. and I strongly recommend you do.
ALT
