Author: Brin

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

My thoughts sometimes (or maybe “often”; I’m not sure which way to categorise it) write themselves in forms resembling blog posts. They’ve done this sort of thing for a long time, but now that I have a Tumblr they’re often more specifically Tumblr posts.

Some of them I adapt into diary entries (particularly the ones that might not actually make any sense to other people), some into forum comments. Occasionally there is one sufficiently standalone (and relatively unlikely to start a flamewar) that I can actually use it in its original form. Many require jumping-off points that don’t actually exist; once in a blue moon, I stumble across roughly the right jumping-off point after the fact and manage to dig through my memory and find the prepared response I now have an excuse to give. Many never leave my head: things I wanted to say to people, but never found a good opportunity, or was too afraid, or was simply worried nobody wanted to hear.

I don’t know what to do about wanting to write but not having a good enough excuse to give people the words I have. I don’t know if there’s anything I should do.

Tags:

#(and yes this post is itself an example of what it’s talking about) #(though I made some tweaks to the wording as I was writing it down) #(this one is fresh and the phrasing hadn’t fully settled yet anyway) #oh look an original post

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Anonymous asked: I actually just had a sex dream for the first time. But I was a guy in it, which was weird (cuse im not), and it was more like I was reading something than actually experiencing it. Very weird, and not unpleasant, just confusing.

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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{{OP by asexualactivities}}

brin-bellway:

(something something be the change you want to see in the world, hold on)

(okay, let’s see if this works)

Wait, do other people have a distinction in dreams between reading a story and experiencing it? “I’m reading this thing” is sometimes used as a framing device, but I still experience it as I would if it were “actually” happening within the dream.

(The thing about Erotic Dream Week is you see some of the non-sexual variety in people’s dreams too. Although I already knew non-prosopagnosics tend to see faces in dreams, so that part didn’t confuse me.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #dreams #prosopagnosia #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

King of Memes

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

buckykingofmemes:

Or, how Tony Found Out About Bucky’s Blog. 

Tony couldn’t seep. Sometimes he managed a few hours if he was tired enough, so usually he went to the gym and worked out until he was exhausted. Tonight, though, he found the gym already occupied: Barnes, with his hair tied up, working steadily at the heavy bag. Normally Tony would make an awkward comment and leave him to it, but instead he just heads for the opposite side of the gym. After setting up at one of the far treadmills, Tony worked his way to a easy run. Barnes was laying his fists rhythmically into the bag, and the quiet thumping was sort of strangely soothing. Between the running and the thumping, Tony slipped into a near-trancelike state.

 And then Barnes let out an ungodly howl, drew back his left fist, and slammed it straight through the heavy bag with a roar of, “DIE A THOUSAND BURNING DEATHS!”

Tony fell off the treadmill, scrambled to his feet, and booked it to the elevator.

kingofmemes posted:

holy shit you guys there was a spider on my punching bag !!! thanks to my many years of combat experience & martial arts training things are okay now

Posted at 4:47 AM, 37294 notes

Keep reading

Tags:

#Marvel #fanfic #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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rendakuenthusiast:

chroniclesofrettek:

inquisitivefeminist:

brin-bellway:

sinesalvatorem:

I just watched Mean Girls! Damn, that movie is so Problematic I love it.

Mean Girls confuses me greatly.

It seemed to me like standard pro-homeschool propaganda, though with a bittersweet ending tacked on over the usual bad ending. It’s the cautionary tales homeschoolers tell each other, converted to movie format.

A movie like that is inherently niche: it can’t have mainstream appeal because the mainstream itself is the villain.

I watched it at a party with a group of public schoolers once, and I was boggled that they liked it. A movie that hated them, that called them animals (and not in the technical sense), and yet they were enjoying it.

Is this that “you aren’t stuck in traffic, you are traffic” thing? Nobody’s bothered by anti-public-schooler sentiment because everyone thinks of themselves as not counting, that the sentiment is directed at all those other people?

(Or maybe I was supposed to pattern-match it to Relatable Stories Reminding Me of My Own Life, and enjoy it on that level? But since I never went to public school, the thing in my life it best pattern-matched to was propaganda rather than personal experience, completely changing my perception of the film?)

What strikes you as homeschool propaganda, the thing where Cady is Corrupted By Popularity and ends up changing her whole personality?  Or the thing where the movie talks about how High School Is Like A Jungle/otherwise terrible?  Because both of those are very common teen movie tropes, and I’m curious if you’d react in a similar way to similar movies.

The first five minutes were a brutally realistic depiction of high school instead of the more tropey version I’m used to. Sort of like the opening of Saving Private Ryan vs a more conventional war movie. 

I went to a heavily academically-focused private high school so maybe the dynamics were different from a public school. But I mostly took the movie to be about cliques of people that weren’t mine, and really mostly about things girls did that boys didn’t do. So yeah, I pretty much didn’t think I counted, as far as the movie being about people like me. I also didn’t really like or identify with the movie, although I didn’t think it was terrible either.

You know what bugged me about mean girls? They never said where specifically in Africa they were from. Even though they make jokes about this themselves.

(I tried to fit all of my responses to this thread in the last post, but I saw another branch I wanted to respond to.)

It’s been a while since the last time I saw it, so maybe this doesn’t fit in with the canon, but I thought they weren’t from anywhere specific in Africa. Rather, they travelled around a lot within the continent. Wasn’t that why she was homeschooled, because they never settled down anywhere long enough for her to attend a school?

(I don’t know, maybe I just filled in the blanks from having occasionally met people who were homeschooled because their family was too nomadic to do otherwise.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #Mean Girls

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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inquisitivefeminist:

brin-bellway:

sinesalvatorem:

I just watched Mean Girls! Damn, that movie is so Problematic I love it.

Mean Girls confuses me greatly.

It seemed to me like standard pro-homeschool propaganda, though with a bittersweet ending tacked on over the usual bad ending. It’s the cautionary tales homeschoolers tell each other, converted to movie format.

A movie like that is inherently niche: it can’t have mainstream appeal because the mainstream itself is the villain.

I watched it at a party with a group of public schoolers once, and I was boggled that they liked it. A movie that hated them, that called them animals (and not in the technical sense), and yet they were enjoying it.

Is this that “you aren’t stuck in traffic, you are traffic” thing? Nobody’s bothered by anti-public-schooler sentiment because everyone thinks of themselves as not counting, that the sentiment is directed at all those other people?

(Or maybe I was supposed to pattern-match it to Relatable Stories Reminding Me of My Own Life, and enjoy it on that level? But since I never went to public school, the thing in my life it best pattern-matched to was propaganda rather than personal experience, completely changing my perception of the film?)

What strikes you as homeschool propaganda, the thing where Cady is Corrupted By Popularity and ends up changing her whole personality?  Or the thing where the movie talks about how High School Is Like A Jungle/otherwise terrible?  Because both of those are very common teen movie tropes, and I’m curious if you’d react in a similar way to similar movies.

#I can think of way more examples for the first one  #I think the second one is more common in like books  #(and adaptations of books)  #probably to appeal to Sensitive People Who Read  #but it’s still definitely a common cultural trope

Both of them are also common tropes in cautionary tales about why you shouldn’t go to public school. Corrupted By Popularity is more disturbing when you’re a kid hearing these stories, but as I’ve gotten older I find High School Is Like A Jungle getting worse because of that…that knowing superiority embedded in it. “Yes,” it says, “we’ve all had times where we looked at a group of public school kids and saw a pack of lesser animals for a moment before they resolved into people. Most, perhaps all, of us have had times where they never resolved into people at all. It’s okay; not only okay, but worth encouraging.” And that’s…not…okay? It’s sure as hell not worth encouraging. Like, yeah I’ve done it, and I don’t feel inclined to beat myself up over it, but these days I try to actually see people as people? Not seeing people as people has a pretty bad track record in general.

—

@sinesalvatorem​

“Yeah, I think public schoolers see it and think ‘Oh, yeah, I remember that shit at my school’.

ie: It’s not anti-public-school propaganda any more than people think the
average sit-com is anti-family propaganda. It’s a dramatised and
exaggerated version of their /actual lives/.”

#i mean i went to school in a completely different culture  #and still spent that movie going ‘oh yeah i remember that’

…huh. I really liked sitcoms as a kid, but I liked them to the extent that they did not remind me of my own life. They were–rather like Mean Girls, actually–glimpses into other ways of being.

I did once hear that Roseanne was so popular because it reminded people of themselves, and that surprised me. I liked Roseanne best because, as an upper-middle-class homeschooled kid, the lives of the Connors were completely alien to me, and I thought that was fascinating. I mean, it’s certainly possible to have a more alien-to-me life than they did–hell, I’m pretty sure you have one yourself, Alison–but people more foreign than them are generally portrayed as foreign, as people who are interestingly strange rather than interestingly identifiable-with. Roseanne portrayed itself as normal, as a story made by and for an alternate universe where people actually lived like that, and that was why it appealed to me.

—

It may be worth noting that IME, homeschooled minors generally do not date. Teen relationship drama pings as foreign to me, because…look, one time I heard through the grapevine that some sixteen-year-old in the community was dating someone, and the reason that got passed through the grapevine was because it was unusual for a sixteen-year-old to be dating at all. Another time, we got this one age ~14-15 kid who’d started out in public school and only recently switched to homeschooling. Apparently he flirted with the other kids around his age, most of whom didn’t notice and the remainder were weirded out. I honestly don’t know whether he flirted with me or not; I was in the oblivious majority, and I only know this was happening because I heard the parents talking about it.

Bear in mind, this was all among secular homeschoolers.

Mind you, even with the cautionary tales it’s very common for kids to switch to public school later on, especially at the middle-school/high-school transition, and the kids who do this tend to be more otherwise-normal than the kids who don’t. The weirdness level of homeschooled kids thus becomes more concentrated the older they get; in particular, groups of homeschooled teens are frequently upwards of 50% autistic. There are confounding factors and probably complicated feedback loops when it comes to which differences in homeschooling culture are actually cultural.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #homeschool

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

sinesalvatorem:

I just watched Mean Girls! Damn, that movie is so Problematic I love it.

Mean Girls confuses me greatly.

It seemed to me like standard pro-homeschool propaganda, though with a bittersweet ending tacked on over the usual bad ending. It’s the cautionary tales homeschoolers tell each other, converted to movie format.

A movie like that is inherently niche: it can’t have mainstream appeal because the mainstream itself is the villain.

I watched it at a party with a group of public schoolers once, and I was boggled that they liked it. A movie that hated them, that called them animals (and not in the technical sense), and yet they were enjoying it.

Is this that “you aren’t stuck in traffic, you are traffic” thing? Nobody’s bothered by anti-public-schooler sentiment because everyone thinks of themselves as not counting, that the sentiment is directed at all those other people?

(Or maybe I was supposed to pattern-match it to Relatable Stories Reminding Me of My Own Life, and enjoy it on that level? But since I never went to public school, the thing in my life it best pattern-matched to was propaganda rather than personal experience, completely changing my perception of the film?)

Tags:

#everyone’s got some friend of a friend #who switched to public school and completely fucked up their life and their personality #reply via reblog #Mean Girls #apparently I’m in an italic-y mood today #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #homeschool

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