When your head hits the pillow tonight, remind yourself that you’ve done a good job. You are headed down your path at your own pace, and with every obstacle you are trying your utmost best. Be patient with yourself, and remember that big things are achieved not all at once, but one day at a time.
Shout out to people like me who have parents who are loving but are black holes of emotional labor… It took me a long time to realize that it’s okay to have mixed feelings about your parents, about your relationship with them.
Sometimes parents can love you but be somewhat toxic to you and your growth, and that’s a very hard realization to come to if you, like me, grew up extremely close to them.
Sometimes parents can love you genuinely but lack emotional maturity, forcing you to perform disproportionate amounts of emotional labor. Some parents manifest symptoms of their mental illness in ways that are toxic to your mental illness.
Some parents, like mine, try so hard to be good parents but fall back on habits of emotional manipulation because they haven’t processed their own traumas and are modeling behavior they grew up with. That doesn’t make their behavior acceptable, and it’s okay to feel exhausted and hurt when they betray you. You don’t have to forgive every mistake.
I want you to know that it’s okay to protect yourself, to need some space apart from them. The love you have for your parents is still valid, and you are making the right decision.
Placing a safe emotional distance between myself and my parents has been one of the most difficult, heartbreaking processes I’ve ever gone through… it hurts to try to curb the strength of your own natural empathy around people you love. It feels disingenuous to your heart’s natural state.
But I promise you, you are not hard-hearted or ungrateful, and you are not abandoning them. You are making a decision about your own emotional, mental, and spiritual health.
I know what it’s like in that confusing grey area of love mixed with guilt and anxiety, of exhaustion and quasi-manipulation and unreciprocated emotional labor, and I promise you, you are not alone.
Just remember. There is no such thing as a fake geek girl. There are only fake geek boys. Science fiction was invented by a woman.
Specifically a teenage girl. You know, someone who would be a part of the demographic that some of these boys are violently rejecting.
Isaac Asimov.
yo mary shelley wrote frankenstein in 1818 and isaac asimov was born in 1920 so you kinda get my point
If you want to push it back even further Margaret Cavendish, the duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673) wrote The Blazing World in 1666, about a young woman who discovers a Utopian world that can only be accessed via the North Pole - oft credited as one of the first scifi novels
Women have always been at the forefront of literature, the first novel (what we would consider a novel in modern terms)was written by a woman (Lady Muraskai’s the Tale of Genji in the early 1000s) take your snide “Isaac Asimov” reblogs and stick it
even in terms of male scifi authors, asimov was predated by Jules Verne, HG Wells, George Orwell, you could have even cited Poe or Jonathan Swift has a case but Asimov?
PbbBFFTTBBBTBTTBBTBTTT so desperate to discredit the idea of Mary Shelly as the mother of modern science fiction you didn’t even do a frickin google search For Shame
And if you want to go back even further, the first named, identified author in history was Enheduanna of Akkad, a Sumerian high priestess.
Kinda funny, considering this Isaac Asimov quote on the subject:
Mary Shelley was the first to make use of a new finding of science which she advanced further to a logical extreme, and it is that which makes Frankenstein the first true science fiction story.
Even Isaac Asimov ain’t having none of your shit, not even posthumously.
You know what else was invented by women? Masked vigilantes, the precursor to the modern superhero. Baroness Emma Orczy wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1905.
The character would later inspire better known masked vigilantes such as Zorro and Batman.
Stick that in your international pipe and smoke it
I have literally been telling people this for over a year.
the first extended prose piece - ie a novel, was not, as many male scholars will shout, Don Quixote (1605) but The Tale of Genji (1008) written by a woman
The first autobiography ever written in English is also attributed to a woman, The Book of Margery Kempe (1430s).
The day may come when I find this post and do not reblog it, but it is not this day.
Keepalive is Aram Bartholl’s fake hollow boulder in the woods of Neuenkirchen, Germany. It conceals a thermoelectric generator that powers a router configured to serve documents related to wilderness survival. The router switches on if the rock is sufficiently warmed, say by a blazing campfire adjacent to it.
It’s based on Piratebox, a standalone Internet router project for file-sharing.
It’s not the only art/artificial boulder project, though: Ed Ruscha claims to have made an artificial boulder called “Rocky II” and hidden it somewhere in the Mojave, where it is visually indistinguishable from the surrounding rocks, making it all but impossible to find.
that magic rock in the Mojave is going to confuse the fuck out of our descendants one day.
probably not. it’s just a rock. most rocks go unregarded
most rocks aren’t wifi access points!
you need to regard a rock to find out if it is a wifi access point.
w hat the fuck. did the world’s most sadistic text adventure game writer make this rock
You are lost in a woodland clearing. There is a large boulder and a pile of firewood nearby. > check cell phone You open your cell phone to google wilderness survival tips, but you don’t have any service. > make campfire with firewood You could light a fire here, but you’d still be lost. > regard rock It’s a large rock. The underside of the rock appears slightly charred. > light campfire under rock Pretty soon you have a blazing campfire going underneath the boulder. > regard rock The strange boulder, now warmed, has begun to emit a faint mechanical hum. > check cell phone You open your cell phone. There is one wifi network available, named “KeepAlive.” > connect to rock wifi The wifi router opens a webpage full of documents on wilderness survival. > ????? Invalid command. > why Invalid command. > who hides secrets in a magic heat-activated rock Invalid command.
