a lot of young girls need to realize that keeping friendships alive gets so hard after high school/uni and that you have to actively nurture your friendships if you want them to last yes even the friendships of 2 decades….. your 20s are so disorienting and trauamtizing no one can afford to take friendships for granted… everybody worries about not finding a romantic partner lets start worrying about being friendless by the time you hit 30

hey uh. I didn’t learn this lesson. I’ve spent years and years at a time without the kind of friends that interact with you every week, or even every month. Without the kind of friends that you see often and know well. During my 20′s and into my 30′s I let my friends get to arms length and before i knew it they  were all miles away.

I’ve reconnected with some people who have shared the strongest bonds with me, which is good, it’s very good, but those few people all live in different states or countries now, they have kids or intense careers or their time is filled by lots of everyday friends, and so I go months at a time without seeing or talking to friends.

I finally had to schedule weekly phone calls with two or three just so I could maintain SOME kind of friendship.

But it has become a very lonely life.

Don’t assume you’ll always have friends, or that you can always make new friends. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that friendships don’t require purposeful effort to maintain. When you day-dream about your best possible future, don’t forget to include specifics about your friends being there, and then when you work toward those dreams, make sure some of the work is to keep those friendships active.

Up through the middle of the 20th Century, a lot of women in Western culture spent a lot of time purposefully maintaining those social bonds with their friends (and also just with people in the community).

You know how they did it? Luncheons. Tea parties. Ladies’ Aid meetings. Book clubs. Bridge clubs. Formal social calls–fifteen minutes or half-an-hour at one house, then on to the next, all afternoon. Garden parties. “The Ladies Who Lunch.” Now, some of this is class-based; but even working-class women did a scaled-down version of this, usually, in their off-hours.

Men did this too, on a smaller scale; bowling leagues, going to ball games together, playing golf, poker night. Joining something like the Rotary or the Elks or the VFW.

One of the things that got lost over the course of the late 20th Century was this knowledge that social bonds had to be maintained on purpose if they were going to last, and the skills of how to do that. Boomers looked at their parents’ lives, didn’t like them, thought it was so old-fashioned and conservative and empty, and didn’t ask if there was an underlying reason for it. (And what other forms “maintaining positive social bonds” might take in a modern context.) And so set about either dismantling or neglecting those norms and groups until today, when there are only vestiges left.

And now we look around and we’re so lonely and we don’t know why or how to change it, because from Gen Z on down, we didn’t have the examples of previous generations showing us what a purposeful social life could look like. So if you happen to be naturally good at making friends, you’re fine; and if you’re not, you’re in trouble.

But these are fixable things. We can create our own versions of things to help support our own (and other peoples’) social needs! It’s not some arcane alchemy! Here are some things you can do:

• Schedule regular meetings/phone calls with friends. This can be a simple phone call, or it can be a game night, or just a monthly “everyone bring chips and dip and we’ll hang out” night.
  
• Find a group that does something you like and join it. Check flyers at the post office, or Meetup.com, or something.
  

male gaze is not 'when person look sexy' or 'when misogynist make film'

death of the author is not 'miku wrote this'

I don't think you have to read either essay to grasp the basic concepts

death of the author means that once a work is complete, what the author believes it to mean is irrelevant to critical analysis of what's in the text. it means when analysing the meaning of a text you prioritise reader interpretation above author intention, and that an interpretation can hold valid meaning even if it's utterly unintentional on the part of the person who created the thing. it doesn't mean 'i can ignore that the person who made this is a bigot' - it may in fact often mean 'this piece of art holds a lot of bigoted meanings that the author probably wasn't intentionally trying to convey but did anyway, and it's worth addressing that on its own terms regardless of whether the author recognises it's there.' it's important to understand because most artists are not consciously and vocally aware of all the possible meanings of their art, and because art is communal and interpretive. and because what somebody thinks they mean, what you think somebody means, and what a text is saying to you are three entirely different things and it's important to be able to tell the difference.

male gaze is a cinematographic theory on how films construct subjectivity (ie who you identify with and who you look at). it argues that film language assumes that the watcher is a (cis straight white hegemonically normative) man, and treats men as relatable subjects and women as unknowable objects - men as people with interior lives and women as things to be looked at or interacted with but not related to. this includes sexual objectification and voyeurism, but it doesn't mean 'finding a lady sexy' or 'looking with a sexual lens', it means the ways in which visual languages strip women of interiority and encourage us to understand only men as relatable people. it's important to understand this because not all related gaze theories are sexual in nature and if you can't get a grip on male gaze beyond 'sexual imagery', you're really going to struggle with concepts of white or abled or cis subjectivities.

When you realize that shot of Anya at the orphanage in 'Souvenir' is actually...

...Twilight's POV of this:

The two shots are actually of the same event - look at the chair! the heater! the pail! Anya holding Mr Chimera! Her eyeline! The crossword puzzle! It's just that the angle is different, and the lighting too. And of course, who is telling the story too.

That shot in 'Souvenir' - that's Twilight's cherished memory of meeting Anya for the first time, of her looking up at him for the first time. It's not just Anya's world that's dark and lonely, it's how Twilight saw the world before his daughter made it colorful...

And now they have each other 🥹 (and a mama and a doggo)

You know the remarks on how kids see Coraline as an adventure, and adults see it as horror because they just see a child in danger? The juxtaposition of povs in these two images has the same energy.

I made a baby blanket for a pregnant woman at work and I went back and forth about it like “is this weird? To like hand make something for someone when we’re like friendly acquaintances not like bffs. God why are you so fucking awkward.” Anyway I gave it to her and she said she loved it and in the back of my head I’m like yea she’s nice and probably just humoring the weirdo. Well she texted me a picture this weekend of a scrunchy faced newborn at the hospital wrapped in the blanket I made her. And I’m like. Wow. She loved it so much she took it with her! To the hospital! To give birth! She wrapped her newborn it! I am just so filled with love and joy right now.

People will love the things you make them. Because you thought of them and you cared.

so turns out mindlessly scrolling on my phone for 4 hours didn't actually make me feel better

another 4 hours should do the trick

fucks me up that by total coincidence the sun and moon's size difference is exactly matched to their difference in distance from us, thus making our beautiful total solar eclipses where you can see the silver threads of the sun's corona possible because the moon just covers the sun completely

The stars (literally) aligned just right for this experience to be possible. It's likely that aliens don't have this

The moon is also absolutely gargantuan by moon standards. It isn't the largest moon in the solar system, but it is BY FAR the largest in comparison with its planet. Ganymede is the largest satellite of Jupiter and the largest moon in the solar system. Its diameter is only about 3.8% of Jupiter's. Titan's radius is 4.4% of Saturn's. Callisto and Io are the next largest in the neighborhood, with 3.4% and 2.6% the diameter of Jupiter respectively.

Our moon is number 5. It is smaller in direct comparison to the above moons. The diameter of the moon is 3475 km. That is a full 27% of the diameter of the Earth. More than a quarter. That's ridiculous. It's unheard of. The universe is large enough that the word unique probably doesn't mean a lot, but this might be about as close as you get.

This has had a huge impact on our planet. Other things aliens might not have are significant tides. One of Mars's dumpy little potatoes wouldn't be able to move oceans the way our moon does.

Our moon has also stabilized our axis to a massive degree. Without her up there our axis would wobble all over the place and our climate would be far more chaotic. Aliens might not be quite so lucky.

I guess what I am really trying to say is that the moon is extremely cool. I like the moon.

Just want to add that the reason we have such a large moon is because a whole planet crashed into proto-Earth. Theia (the planet) and Earth got so superheated by this collision that their component cores fused and the impact jettisoned a lot of material into space. That massive amount of jettisoned material became our moon. So Earth and the moon have very similar composition. This does not seem to be a common method of lunar formation.

this is insane...

i call my parents and say ‘yeah i can’t do family stuff tonight, i got too much stuff to do for school’ and i e-mail my professor and say ‘i can’t do my assignments tonight, work got crazy’ and i text my boss and say ‘sorry i can’t work late tonight, i gotta some family stuff’ and through this triangulation of deceitful excuses i at last will be free

Actually— no I’m not done, I have more to say. The more time people spend writing articles about how Taylor Swift or Beyonce are “so astronomically rich” and “money-hungry” for putting out music, the less we talk about the men who have 500x their wealth, own the means of production, and make their money off of exploitative business practices that lead to the deaths of workers, abuse of natural resources, and genocide of populations. I’m over it.

It’s not even just “not confirmed!” It’s a possible estimate based on some pretty shaky data. Taylor’s net worth, the amount of money she’d have if she sold everything she owns, is estimated 400-560 million. She has an estimated 63 million in liquid assets.

The assertion was that she could be a billionaire by the time the Eras tour ends, and that’s based off of the assumption that she’ll break her record from Reputation, the highest-grossing female tour of all time sitting at 345.7 million gross income. But— that’s gross income, the amount if money coming in BEFORE you pay your contracts, your employees, give ticketmaster a cut, pay the roadies, the backup dancers, the stadiums, the stadium workers, the merch table workers, the merchandise materials, the manufacturing contracts, the equipment rental, and so on and so on.

So, sure— if she broke her touring gross income record again and got to, say, 440 million, and at the most liberal of estimates she has a net worth of 560 million, that does equal one billion dollars, but that’s not her take-home money. Whatever her take-home portion of 440 million dollars is, based on the last few tours, is maybe going to add 100-200 million to her net worth, which is still 300 million + away from billionaire status… which is not to mention how much money she willingly gives away that lands her on the lists of most charitable celebrities every year, so it’s likely that even if she did take home that much, she’s not likely to hoard it.

And then, of course, on top of all of that— her most likely current net worth of 400 dollars is directly compared to Bezos’s in this graphic. And when you have to go more than five hundred people down the Real-Time Billionaires list to get to the people who have just one billion— the one billion dollars Taylor Swift does not have and is not likely to have— maybe, just maybe, someone else is the face of the exploitation of capitalism.

“hey it could be worse” well i would like it not to be. how about that