Spider-Punk by Sanford Greene, for the promotional material for the movie

Y'know, some people do have a strong crying response to stress, and they might cry (even against their own will) when faced with an upsetting situation and that doesnt mean they are “gaslighting” or “manipulating” you.

There are people who use crying as a manipulation tactic? Absolutely. But that doesn’t mean that every person that cries during a heated argument is trying to get under your skin. They have their own emotions and issues, and frankly, not everything other people do is a personal attack on you.

People who use crying as a manipulation tactic are actually counting on you coddling them so they can redirect or avoid the conversation, meanwhile people who can’t control that they cry when they’re upset often struggle to be taken seriously because of their tears and find the coddling frustrating.

In either case, the best response is to ask if they need a moment to collect themself. If they say yes, agree to a time when you will continue the conversation and hold them to it. If they say no, continue on with the conversation exactly as if they were not crying.

Stg many conversations would be much easier if people would LISTEN when I say “yes I know I’m crying, please ignore it.”

season 2 stancy and the trauma leading up to the breakup haunts me cause like–they are two sides of the same fucking coin. 

barb dies. there’s no warning, nothing smart, good girl nancy could’ve done. she just dies, and there’s no way to prove it, no body to show, no car, no adult who will listen. she died because nancy didn’t go home on a school night, because nancy had a beer and had barb try one too, because she jumped in the pool and slept with her boyfriend. barb died because nancy took the night off. nancy–standing in the early morning light in her boyfriend’s hoodie, looking around for her best friend and knowing deep in her bones something is wrong–dies that day too.

a girl dies in his pool. barb, nancy’s friend. he didn’t know her except through nancy, wouldn’t have been able to pick her out of a lineup and now she’ll always be in his house, he’ll always see some outline of her sitting there from his bedroom window–an outline too hazy to pick out detail and too solid to deny because king steve didn’t hang out with her crowd but new okay human being steve can’t ignore her either. barb died because he wasn’t a good person, because he cared, but not enough. steve–byers’ bruises along his temple and nail bat in his hand–dies that day too.

so nancy grows up too quick too fast, learns that anything good has to be hard to get or it’s bullshit, doesn’t make new friends doesn’t get tied down to more than what’s leftover–steve, who ties himself to everything, who embeds himself in the role of loving, caring boyfriend and babysitter and the fun high school senior, cause what else does he have?

and they love each other, they do, but they can’t see each other. steve–eyes shut tight, hoping if he doesn’t look maybe he can blip right over it, maybe they can both still be stupid teenagers who love each other, and nancy–looking straight ahead, still looking for barb because she never found a body and only ever seeing the stupid, naive nancy in her stupid, jerk boyfriend’s hoodie. and they can’t see each other, and more than that, even if could, they wouldn’t, they won’t. they won’t.

they’re both stuck in the same burning house, but where one of them is trying to run out, popping back in another door every time she gets just far enough, the other is running in turning the locks and shutting the windows tight. and it’s still burning. it’s still burning.

barb dies in the pool and nobody lives.

i think if we’re going to have conversations about consent we should talk about how consenting to something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be a good experience, and having a bad experience doesn’t necessarily mean someone violated your consent. this can apply to a lot of situations but the two i’m thinking of right now are sex and transition.

you’re getting it on with someone. you enthusiastically consent to having sex with them. afterward, you feel a little weird about it. maybe even distressed. maybe they did something you didn’t enjoy and in the moment you just didn’t say anything. maybe you just realized after the fact that you were not in a good headspace for sex and now your mental health is declining. that doesn’t inherently mean the person you had sex with violated your consent. sometimes it just means you need to take a break from sex or work on communicating your needs or boundaries better during sex.

and with transition, i feel like this is something that gets consistently overlooked but like. there will never be zero detransitioners. there will always be people who decide that actually transition wasn’t right for them. they could have had the best most thorough doctors in the world who did everything by the book and got full informed consent at every step. and some people are still going to decide they don’t like the changes and wish they hadn’t transitioned. that doesn’t mean that the doctors violated their consent, and that doesn’t mean that transition shouldn’t be available to anyone. it just means that we need to have more resources available for folks who detransition.

regret does not automatically mean someone did something wrong. regret is simply one possible result of having bodily autonomy, and i think we need to get more comfortable with that.

Do we have a franz kafka diary entry for july 1st, i want to know what he thinks!!!

happy too tired July everyone

humans don’t have enough ornamentation. where’s the plumage, the antlers

i could go for a good vibrant throat sac i could display as i sing in the mating season

Humans have some of the most extreme hair variation over their bodies in the animal kingdom, with hair on some parts of our body a few millimetres long and fine enough to be almost invisible, and hair in other parts a good metre long if not artificially trimmed. Part of the inside of our mouths are turned out to make our lips bright red, we have comically oversized breasts and lack penis bones to make erections more indicative of impressive circulation, and have some of the most complex behavioural adaptations to self-ornamentation for courtship seen in anything that doesn’t spend half its life collecting blue bottle caps. How much ornamentation do you want?

I’d like antlers, as previously stated

I want bioluminescence

Sonar

Flared webbing would be nice

I could go for some bright feathers myself

Yes we need more chaste twee baby gay romances like heartstopper and yes we also need more shows where men fuck raw to express their love for one another like Élite and yes we need more toxic gays having hate sex like Interview with the Vampire and yes we need more incidental gay characters like the dads in cartoons like Owl House.

It's not a competition! It's a hoard and I'm like a gay little Smaug.

prayer to whichever dead catholic person is most appropriate: may I not have to run a whole week of surprise camps on crutches. in a knee brace.

Im agnostic raised liberal protestant, but absolutely the catholics got saints right. Sometimes your problem is so fucking specific you need Some Guy. If you're listening, Guy of Workers Who Have Strain Injuries,

No fucking WAY, there's actually a knee injury Guy? Catholicism accidentally reinventing the medical specialty system......

I know you're wondering: are there slutty pictures of him revealing his knees?

Saint Roch, by Francesco Ribalta, c. 1625, Museo de Bellas Artes, Valencia

[image id: st. Roch staring soulfully and hiking up his robe to show that his thigh has a bubo on it, also sluttily revealing his knees]

what the dog doin

Melody 🌊

Ariel and Melody 💖

More Ariel and Melody! <3