Always RB: because there is never enough love. And fanfic love is some of the purest.
“‘What will it matter in 100 years time?’
‘It matters now.’”
~Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad
“Here and now, we are alive”
-Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
“We are here, and this is now… Vimes understood it to mean, in less exalted copper speak, that you have to do the job that is in front of you.”
~ Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
tbh i think so many people on earth would not only be healed but invigorated by the idea that not everyone is meant to or capable of having a skinny body
like what if we started viewing fat ppl's bodies as inherently deserving of respect and value and love as nonfat bodies? what a concept omg what if we saw fat ppl as not "at their lowest point" or "a work in progress" and instead assessed them as human beings in totality? im so quirky for imagining this lol
I really cannot emphasize enough the mental health benefits of abandoning the idea that you're special.
This goes both ways, both "You don't have to do everything singlehanded" and "You're not uniquely awful."
This is something I came to grips with as part of years of recovering from PTSD and it was so, so important. Realizing that the worst thing in my life has also happened to so many other people was at first disappointing because I wanted to be special to give my suffering meaning. Then I realized that my suffering isn't what makes me special or interesting. And once I let go of needing to be special, I started paying attention to all the ways other people enrich my life and just became happier.
Daughter of fantasy villains decides to rebel against her parents by actually going through with her arranged marriage to a local golden retriever of a prince instead of running off with some local villain-to-be or conquering said golden retriever’s kingdom and ruling it solo like her parents expect her to. Plus, sue her, she’s into the clean-cut earnest look.
At the same time, local prince charming discovers that he’s actually very into the gothic fiance his parents have landed him with in order to try and establish peace with the local evil lair down the lane, he would never have guessed a spiderweb pattern could look so fetching on a ball gown…?
Meanwhile, two pairs of parents in a tizzy because they both expected their offspring to whole-heartedly reject this union and give them an excuse to conquer their goody-two-shoes/evil neighbours, they’re not supposed to actually like each other-!
respective friend groups undergoing culture clash like all of prince charming’s knights are like what vile spell has been used to ensorcel our prince. we must be on our guard for surely this is but a ruse for an assassination attempt
meanwhile the villain bride’s friends are all like clearly he loves you not, why do you persist in a manner that will ensure your own heart break, i mean if he was taking this seriously there would be at least three assassination attempts by now. it’s like he doesn’t even notice that you have massive amounts of dark power to covet for his own
smashcut to
fully armored knight, clanging through the hallways in attempts at stealth, blades drawn: i’m just saying, i took an oath of protection. this feels wrong.
prince charming: it’s not wrong, it’s celebrating cross cultural traditions for my beloved bride
knight: it’s attempted murder
prince charming: it’s a loving attempted murder
The real reason fantasy and sci fi book covers painted by human artists are superior to their AI-generated counterparts is that when the AI gets everything wrong it's almost always a trivial exercise to figure out what prompt it was given and how it free-associated its way to the result, but a human artist will hit you with an elaborately laid out black-velvet rendering of a scene which absolutely does not happen in the book, populated by people who in spite of their distinctive and wildly eccentric designs are not identifiable as any specific character, and the challenge of puzzling out what the fuck they thought they were painting is often more interesting than the actual book.
The book: Paint-by-numbers Tolkienesque fantasy.
The cover artist: Fuck you, here's a cowboy on a spaceship.
Me: This is the happiest day of my life.
The cover art spec: A medieval warrior with a magic sword fights orcs in some ancient ruins.
The art-generating AI: I drew a medieval warrior with a magic sword fighting orcs in some ancient ruins.
The human artist: I drew a dude wearing a Viking-themed BDSM harness wielding a lightsabre against a horde of jacked lion-men amid the wreckage of a crashed alien starship under the light of a triple sun. Also, one of the lion-men is being eaten by a pterodactyl. I don't remember why.
There’s some company, blackstone, blackwater, something like that, buying up houses that go on sale for 30k above asking price. Immediately outbidding anyone who tries to buy. Corporations are also buying property all across america.
Fuck…
Nobody comes to my tumblr for this, but Americans need to understand that THIS is why my generation can’t afford to own a house outside of Smallest-Town USA. THIS is also why people my age in bigger cities struggle to find decent apartments that don’t consume half of our monthly income.
Housing Speculation is when rich folk, corporations, and wannabe landlords buy up property and sit on it like dragons hoarding gold. The Dutch have a dragon-adjacent term for this because speculation devastated their housing market in the 70s-80s leading to some gnarly Dutch squatting culture. They let homes sit empty, good as money in the bank and watch the value increase as everyone else competes for the remaining houses. That’s value they can borrow against, that’s a few hundred-thousand dollars if you need some quick cash, that’s a property you can rent out for regular income while charging tenants for repairs or maintenance and fining them for wear and tear. If property values go up and laws prohibit raising the rent by a certain degree, in many places they can find shady ways to evict that tenant, make no changes and charge the next renter more. It’s probably illegal but if you rent to people below a certain income, you can be assured most can’t afford to take you to court.
I live in Chicago. Many of the properties that used to house students, small families, single parents, older people, low-income folks have been gobbled up by little airbnb barons who colonize previously well-established neighborhoods and price out families who’ve lived there for generations because they can’t keep up with the artificially inflated property values. The airbnbs spread like cancer until a handful of people can dominate the “affordable” housing for an entire neighborhood. It’s gentrification on meth, but without the kind of localized money circulation or community improvements you get when people live and work and spend within their neighborhoods. It pushes residents further and further from services and resources until all that’s left is the locked-in commodififation of an exploitable renting class.
If that wasn’t bad enough, it also means that when large areas of habitable property are being hoarded by investors with portfolios of empty houses and airbnbs, that reduces the number of actual residents, which can spoil legislation on a community level. When all the storefront space in a neighborhood like mine is controlled by 4 people, you find the number of businesses and services that catered to lower income families start to become whiskey bars, boutiques, vintage shops, and upscale chain retail, businesses that bring money into the property owners at the expense of community accessibility, turning a once largely Hispanic neighborhood community into a posh little destination for travelers, tourists, and other aspiring business speculators who see every empty building as their next revinue stream. Gut a block of apartments with attached commercial space and build half as many luxury condos above a combination tapas bar and day spa and you’ve instantly got half as many tenants on that block to vote against your expansion schemes. Replacing low-income residents with higher-rent folks also bakes in support for future “improvements” that further contribute to the commodification of communities.
Property ownership has always been a tool of the most privileged class to extract value from the working class because the only options become rent, move, or live on the street for all they care. At which point, the police will sweep you further and further into the gutter until they have an excuse to send you to prison. This kind of speculation and consolidation allows people with excess resources to buy up the things the rest of us require to function and sell it back to us forever.
These are the same people that invented the fairy tale about how if we work hard enough and save and spend like smart people, then we can be landlords too! We can own businesses, raise families, chase dreams and be happy if we are smart like they are. But if we can’t it’s because we’re lazy little parasites who need to have our lives portioned out to us lest we waste time that could be earning money for the landlord.
I hate these fuckers so fucking much.
people need shelter.
corporations that exploit this at the expense of humanity are a nightmare.
the original idea of airbnb is that people would let out their spare rooms, or their own while they were out of town. that was wholesome. what it has become is just not.
