One Thing That's Great About Deadloch Is How Real Everyone Looks. Most Of The Female Characters Don't

today you, tomorrow me.

[Image description: text reading, All the best things in life require a degree of embarrassment, or at least the possibility of it. Dancing, singing, sharing art, cooking food, having sex, holding hands; there is risk in it all. You could burn dinner or sing off key; no act of self expression or love is exempt from this danger /End image description.]

embarrassment has good bones

Fossilas: crinoid stems and stars including a 6 pointed pentacrites and a pyritised ammonte

I'm thinking a lot about the subject of racism and fandom recently because I'm about to publish a fic that's written from the perspective of a character of color and I'm white. I feel a lot of caution around that and I want to explicitly invite any BIPOC readers to let me know how my fic lands with you. Your experiences in particular of it are really important to me. <3 (I'm planning to post in about a week, leaving this here in case any readers look me up after/while reading)

Shout out to all the Black ppl that can no longer participate directly in the fandom they love because of the stresses of racism 👍🏾 you contain multitudes of value and I'm sorry that the color of your skin and the power of your voice makes people not want to acknowledge that.

old people falling in love and solving mysteries > whatever angst the young ones in edgy, unnecessarily explicit shows are going through

[Image description: apparently a social media post from user God, reading Thou shalt not deny gender is a spectrum while claiming to be manlier.

If you can rank it, it's not a binary. /End image description.]

The amount of shitty news coming out this week made me feel like this needed to be said, so.

For all the boys and young men currently afraid that being male means some kind of moral death sentence: the same world that produced Neil Gaiman and Donald Trump also produced Levar Burton, Steve from Blues Clues, and my (step)dad, who isn't famous but did look at a deeply traumatized child with a bunch of mental health issues and said "is anybody going to support that?" and then didn't wait for an answer. There are good men out there doing good work in ways both big and small. Choose to use your strength to help rather than hurt, your voice to speak for those who must be silent, and you can be one of them.

Be the man Mister Rogers knew you could be. He wasn't wrong very often, and he believed you could do wonderful things. I do too.

(Anyone clowning on here will summarily get their ass kicked and their blog blocked. Pain is pain and I know there are a lot of scared teenagers right now.)

Artem Rohovyi - Symphony of Branches gouache on paper

I just really really love this post, y'all. Like, so much. <3

Wait, so you said that you can learn to trust others by building friendships, but how does one go about doing that? Wouldn't someone I don't know be creeped out or annoyed if I suddenly walked up and started talking to them?

Friendships are built of repeated low-stakes interactions and returned bids for attention with slowly increasing intimacy over time.

It takes a long time to make friends as an adult. People will probably think you're weird if you just walk up and start talking to them as though you are already their friend (people think it's weird when I do this, I try not to do this) but people won't think it's weird if you're someone they've seen a few times who says "hey" and then gradually has more conversations (consisting of more words) with them.

I cheat at forming adult friendships by joining groups where people meet regularly. If you're part of a radio club that meets once a week and you just join up to talk about radios, eventually those will be your radio friends.

If there's a hiking meetup near you and you go regularly, you will eventually have hiking friends.

Deeper friendships are formed with people from those kinds of groups when you do things with them outside of the context of the original interaction; if you go camping with your radio friend, that person is probably more friend than acquaintance. If you go to the movies with a hiking friend who likes the same horror movies as you do, that is deepening the friendship.

In, like 2011 Large Bastard decided he wanted more friends to do stuff with so he started a local radio meetup. These people started as strangers who shared an interest. Now they are people who give each other rides after surgery and help each other move and have started businesses together and have gone on many radio-based camping trips and have worked on each other's cars.

Finding a meetup or starting a meetup is genuinely the cheat-code for making friends.

This is also how making friendships at schools works - you're around a group of people very regularly and eventually you get to know them better and you start figuring out who you get along with and you start spending more time with those people.

If you want to do this in the most fast and dramatic way possible, join a band.

In 2020 I wrote something of a primer on how to turn low-stakes interactions with neighbors and acquaintances into more meaningful relationships; check the notes of this post over the next couple days, I'll dig up the link and share it in a reblog.