the weed dispensaries should ask if you would like to round up your purchase to donate to PBS. and if you say yes you get to scan a QR code that gives you 30-day free access to the full run of antiques roadshow. this is how drugs can win the war on drugs again.
i think it’s really fun when a rly specific trope is super popular in one particular medium but in other ones it’s just totally unheard of. it’s the time knife. visual novel players are suuuuper used to death games but many others encountered them for the first time in squid games. the other day my mom showed me all excited the summary of a super original novel she found and it was about a girl who got reincarnated as the main character in her favorite fantasy book
as a person who uses either public bathroom on a toss of a coin i gottta say its kind of ridicuous that people are so attached to them being seperate facilities. youre not usually gonna see anyones dick at the urinal and youre not usually gonna be able to spy on any women. the stalls are the same except one has a little tampon bin. we would lose nothing if all bathrooms were unisex and i’ll die on that hill.
my impression of the public bathroom experience is that nobody is actually looking at eachother and everyone just wants to pee and leave and to try not to touch the toilet seat directly. if youre worried about whats in other peoples pants i think that makes you the weirdo.
i tried to make a venn diagram but my migraine is ironically too bad for me to have the brain power to take the time to fix the proportions and then i locked one of the text layers and got pissed off and gave up. but i kind of like it all fucked up like this
sorry if i’m gonna be quiet for a while. my country recently introduced laws that make it so that in order to use social media to the fullest (not being able to view ns/fw content and in a few cases, not even having access to dms), i HAVE to give the sites my id/face scan.
it goes into effect july 25th. it’ll probably effect here too, since this place allows mature content (tho not full on ns/fw)
i’m very distressed about it bc i might end up not even being able to talk to my internet friends. i don’t really have any irl ones
if i have to disappear on most socials by then, you know why.
if you’re in the uk like i am there IS a petition to sign on the official gov petitions website asking to consider repealing this law. it currently has almost 8k signatures and needs 10k in order for the government to even acknowledge it (and 100k for them to debate it)
idk if i can post it here but please… go sign it! and go write to your local mp if possible. they need to realize how dangerous this law is going to be for uk citizens online. it doesn’t protect children, it’s just privacy invading AND a huge security risk to boot
and if you are NOT in the uk, spread the word around! especially let any uk moots you know about it
When I was a teenager and I struggled to be liked, I was regularly told, “Just be yourself.”
At the time, I couldn’t figure out why that advice wasn’t helpful. But now that I’m in my 30s, I’m just starting to learn what being myself even means, and it’s not even close to what was expected of me as a teenager. “Just be yourself” didn’t make sense to me because I was never allowed to be myself.
I was expected to submit to authority despite hierarchies being absolute bullshit to me. I was expected to write apology letters to my teachers whenever I got in trouble even though I wasn’t sorry at all. I was expected to not only obey them and stay off their radar, but to go out of my way to get on their good side.
I was expected to converse on command. Wanting to be left alone was considered rude.
I was told to “talk to people” despite not knowing what to say and despite my social battery being drained at the time.
I was expected to never talk about my special interest (math) because other people don’t like it. I was also expected to talk about it on command whenever someone needed my help (even though I do math in unique ways that most people wouldn’t understand, and even though my math skills didn’t come with an ability to explain it). I was also labeled as “smart” and expected to be smart in all subjects just because I’m good at math.
I was told to not care if people dislike me. I was also told to stop doing things that would cause people to think I’m weird and dislike me.
I was expected to hold onto thoughts on command, despite that being impossible because countless thoughts run through my head all the time.
I was expected to constantly control every tone, facial expression, and word I said in order to prevent people from making assumptions.
I was often told “just be yourself” when I was going out of my way to guess at how to get attention. But being openly weird and being noticed for it very much IS being myself. I just didn’t know how to do it the correct way at the time.
There were times when I went out of my way to shrink myself and be a people pleaser hoping to be liked or to avoid being punished. This was labeled as “nice” and it became an expectation. People saw that “nice” version of me as “being myself”. When I felt like being nice didn’t work and I decided to try being an asshole, I was told to “be myself”, even though the “myself” they wanted me to be wasn’t myself at all.
The people who told me to be myself are the people who prohibited me the most from being myself. It now makes perfect sense why “just be yourself” was bullshit.
But there is still some truth to the advice to be yourself. You’ll occasionally have to deviate from being yourself. You may have to make yourself invisible to bullies in order to protect yourself (such as an LGBT person being in the closet, or an autistic person masking). You may have to take guesses at how to get noticed. If you’re invited to an activity that isn’t your cup of tea, you may have to give it a try in order to prevent isolating yourself. If someone is kind of an asshole but tolerable, you may have to be nice to them in order to keep open the opportunity of meeting a nicer person through them. But you have to ask yourself whether deviating from being yourself is actually helpful in that scenario. Would the bullies actually leave you alone, or would they still bully you anyway? Would you be able to change yourself long enough for it to work, or would you just get burned out and still fail?
Most importantly, if you have a decent choice between being yourself and being someone you’re not, be yourself. If you have a choice between complete loneliness or someone you have to change for, you may have to change temporarily. But if you have a choice between people who accept you and people who you have to change for, choose the people who accept you. When you’re first trying to connect with people, you’ll often have to sacrifice parts of yourself in order to be more adaptable and increase the number of social interactions you have. Or you may have to try new things in order to figure out what being yourself even means. But after you’ve interacted with enough people, you should pay attention to which connections required the least effort to deviate from yourself, and prioritize those connections.
