Else, or close enough ✨

Celebrities tar and feather themselves for your attention. Behold, a man! No such monster here! No idols hiding under your bed! Believe what you see, not what you read. Read, what do you see? Letterboxes instead of pages?
A touch of manic desperation in their attempts to entertain you, hold your gaze steady like a basilisk. Never look away! See me! See me dance to a tune! A merry little jig! What do you see? A chicken, instead of a man? A jester in a feather suit?

...There's still monsters under your bed. You can't be sure, but the vision-box seems to make less sense the more you stare at it. Not in a pleasant, entertaining way that you had come to know and love, but haven't things gotten more strange lately?

Preen your feathers, young angel. Be what they tell you to be, lest they tar you from head to toe, and no amount of dish soap will save you. Your halo will ever shine bright, amidst the fog and confusion, a beacon of relative safety for those around you. But what was once broken, will stay that way, and no amount of kintsugi will hide the hollow parts inside.

One of the most important lessons I've learned in recent years is that you do not need to have an opinion on everything in the world. Not everything needs some kind of take from you. You don't have to justify not liking something. You don't need to judge everything based on its apparent relationship to the current cultural zeitgeist.

Like, for your sake, you are permitted to just leave things be, let them play out how they'll play out. Don't overestimate the power of your opinions, because chances are they aren't going to change anything regarding the given topic. Like, I promise you your take about how bad of a genre hyperpop is isn't going to have any effect on its popularity no matter how loud you are about it. And that's fine! It's a relief, even, to not have to worry about your sense of responsibility to sway society.

Humans weren't built for constant exposure to everything going on ever. There's only so much information we can process at a time, and trying to exceed that is ultimately unhealthy for your mind. I'm not saying you should just drop out from everything and never talk about anything presently going on in the world ever again. Just, give yourself some room to breathe and just let things be. No pressure.

"You are not compelled to form any opinion at all about this matter before you, not to disturb your peace of mind at all. Things in themselves have no power to extort a verdict from you."

• Marcus Aurelius, 'Meditations,' 161 to 180 CE.

i’m sorry archive team, but this task is impossible.

ssssssooooooooo...

All these fuckers have just finished scraping the internet to build their language sets and their art models and what have you, and suddenly they're all talking about getting rid of inactive accounts...

...I'm sure that doesn't have a thing to do with how pursuing a claim against someone using your work without permission would first require you be able to A.) prove original creatorship, and B.) be alive.