ALT
ALTthe pirate king and his right hand man
Raising kids in a walkable town really underscores the inconvenience and dependence of cars as well. The reality really is completely opposite from the belief. It’s hard to really get across that using a car is a barrier/limiting factor when you have babies and small children. And it’s hard to get across what a much higher quality of life you have when the stuff you access most often - daycare, school, train station, coffee shops, toddler groups - is within a ten-minute walk, so you just wrap the baby in a carrier, fall into step with a friend and go do it. I think that car-centered parents in America are living a much harder and more isolated life, and I’m sure it ripples outward from there. I think that the children in turn have more independence, more relationships, more control, more feeling of ownership of the spaces they move through.
I turn 30 next month so here’s what I learned in my 20s:
—don’t work for startups, they’re always one ‘innovative idea’ away adding ‘sell your kidneys on the black market’ to your job description.
—keeping a collection of basic OTC medicine on you will save your life one day. I recommend Advil, Imodium, and TUMS.
—those little single-use glasses cleaning wipes are 1000% worth the money
—overly self-depreciating jokes just make people uncomfortable, wean yourself off of them
—you can buy dehydrated mini marshmallows in bulk online and they’re a godsend for hot cocoa
—people don’t care if you have fidget toys on your desk they just want to play with them
—try to go to bed BEFORE the existential ennui kicks in
Also drink water and eat a plant
This is all GREAT. I turned 40 last week, so permit me to add what I learned in my 30s:
- keep on not working for startups
- sometimes there comes a point where the thing (fandom, hobby, friendship, romantic relationship) you loved no longer brings you joy. And that's okay. Try to mourn the loss, take joy in the memories, and don't burn any bridges in case ten years go by and you find yourself back in that fandom/hobby/relationship again
- it turns out that (ugh) moderate regular exercise is (spit) good for you. The sooner you make it part of your life, the easier it'll be
- related: if you throw yourself into a new exercise regime too hard and too fast, without stopping to rest or consider whether a particular move is good for you ... well, shoulder injuries are painful and consults with orthopedic surgeons are expensive
- knees are bastards too
- don't even get me started on ankles
- there may come a time when your digestive system is too fragile for ibuprofin. I'm sorry
- one day you're gonna wake up and realise you no longer give any fucks about some things that used to bother you
- on the other hand, you might be alarmed to realise what you still give a fuck about
- never get down on the floor without an exit strategy for getting back up
I turn 50 this year. what I have learned in my 40s:
- "loving yourself" is less of a feeling and more of an action. you can start doing it any time and it will make your life better and better as you go on
- this will happen incrementally - be patient
- along those lines, if you haven't started making an active effort to quit shit-talking yourself, suck it up and do it
- no, shut up. do it. "but it's haaaaard!" don't care. do it.
- whether you like it or not, you are mortal and you need to go to the doctor for an annual checkup
- stretch regularly - your future self will thank you
- at some point you will encounter people much younger than you arguing passionately and incorrectly about history you personally remember and experienced
- this will be infuriating and annoying
- otoh, most other things just... will not matter to you as much
- at some point you will shift from wanting to go out to being like "eh" and deciding to stay in. this is okay.
- you will have absolutely no idea what The Youth are talking about and you will not care
- but if you keep your mind open to new ideas you'll never be irrelevant
- your company still doesn't love you - don't give them more than they pay you for
- get a fucking hobby, especially a hobby that involves physically creating/handling something and/or moving your body in physical space. it will do you more good than you can imagine
Just turned 60 and let me say:
- Find joy, every kind, it's always worth it
- I'm talking that massive, never-ending Discord chat with your bestie? The one that makes you giggle through the day? It's not a "waste of time," it's what time was made for
- If that's fanfic for your favorite characters who never even met on screen celebrate that!
- If that's building a tiny fleet of snake villagers for your snake town and they just cover your mantel hell yes!
- If that's collecting pillows and making a fort of them every weekend I'll be right over
- Feeling and sharing joy is the whole point
This is too tempting…, so, I’m 74, and: don’t fund startups
Please keep stretching and exercise enough NOT to need an elaborate strategy to get up from the floor. IT MAY SAVE YOUR LIFE
Say bye to your employer as early as you possibly can, unless you really love your job. You won’t be sorry.
Keep doing the annual checkups 🙏🏼
Enjoy that fucking hobby you’ve acquired in your 50, or find something new. Do try new things & adventures.
rb to make a biological essentialist mad <3
“This collapse is a telltale sign of a problem known as publication bias. Small, early studies which found a significant sex difference were likelier to get published than research finding no male-female brain difference.”
all the “weird” content on tiktok feels so fabricated and performative. whereas on tumblr you’ll meet someone who will casually admit they eat paint
this sort of sums it up perfectly
ooooo i've seen this one before and it still hilarious ✨
thank you <3
Toby Fox may be the creator I respect most because after creating a game so huge that Nintendo sniped his character for Smash and the Pope's orchestra played his music for the Goddamn Pope I VERY much think it would be within Toby's right to develop of God complex, crack and become insane, go on a bender in the streets of LA, and then have an extremely public Twitter meltdown before getting suspended. Imagining the pressure, I think I personally would do all those things, in that order, in under 6 months' time.
Instead as far as I can tell he's just like "I'm dog" and has been like "I'm dog" since Undertale launched and he's just out there somewhere with near-total anonymity just making his little haha games. Absolute King.
toby fox has had the rightest idea of us all, that he has simply Not Interacted with the internet for the majority of his career. shit aint worth it
"Fan content is for other folks and not me" is a golden rule among publicly-creative types. But he's took it to a whole new level lol. I aspire to that.
One day in 2019, I had pain so bad I went to the ER.
My gut felt like there were red hot needles and knifes being stabbed into it. I felt nauseous. I felt faint. I very nearly threw up.
It was not the first time I felt this way but it was the worst I’d ever felt. I’d been getting increasingly bad pain for over a year and I had gone to countless doctors trying to determine what it was.
The doctors at the ER — thankfully — took me seriously. They determined I had a severely infected gallbladder and the only way to save my life was to have surgery to remove it.
I still had to give consent before the surgery.
I remember being terrified. I was alone. There was no one to help me. And somehow, even though the only course of action I could take was to consent to the surgery the fact that I had to before they could take action made it all the more terrifying. The consequences of the surgery would mean I would live, but I’d never quite be the same. I felt cheated by my own body. Why was it this way? Why couldn’t I be healthy? Functional? Why wasn’t my body working with me?
The nurses, doctors, and surgeons there were all incredibly kind to me.
One surgeon in particular — the one who ended up operating on me — said something that will stick with me for the rest of my life. “Your body is there to help you. Sometimes, when part of the body is no longer helping you, the best thing to do is cut it away. You’ll be so much happier after the surgery. You won’t be in pain anymore.”
I think about that a lot.
I think about it a lot when I see trans men begging for help to get top surgery and are met with resistance or well meaning but ignorant messages begging back to not “mutilate” their body.
I think about my surgeon, who was so kind to me and knew what to say when I was scared and crying and alone in my hospital bed.
Your body is there to help you.
Sometimes, when part of the body is no longer helping you, the best thing to do is cut it away.
You’ll be so much happier after the surgery.
You won’t be in pain anymore.
I hope you get your top surgery.
I hope you will be so much happier.
And I hope the pain will end.
not to enforce gender roles but a computer should NOT fucking have apps okay. if I wanted an app I'd go on my phone my laptop is for Programs. I mean this.
so when food is too salty we might say "打死卖盐的" basically meaning "did you beat the salt merchant to death" but one time in an attempt to be a little polite and a little funny to the chef (my mother) i said "……是不是又跟卖盐的有矛盾了" meaning "are you... having a dispute with the salt merchant again" and now it's a whole thing in my family
anyway point being there has been another altercation with the salt merchant
I fucking hate this "capitalism is when you make money, the more money you make, the more capitalism it is" mindset people have gotten. No, an artist selling their own work is not them engaging in capitalism, it's literally a worker owning their own means of production.
Remember capitalism is someone profiting off of someone else's labor though owning capital. It is not simply the act of profiting at all.
this can't be true can it
Apparently yes and I cannot wrap my head around this. You're telling me most of these teens and early 20 something's dominating social media do not even have a laptop full of organized directories of favorite images? They aren't downloading and playing with creative SOFTWARE rather than stupid little "apps??" They already can't navigate what was supposed to be the new standard level of technological familiarity!?
I just know that… I just let go and had fun with this one. So have it (the fluff version)🖤
(agh, i forgot her scars, damnit. ill fix it tomorrow :~ )