What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

knitmeapony:

knitmeapony:

Kids.  Teenagers.  As someone staring 40 in the face lemme tell you a thing.

You are going to be horrified and embarrassed at some point by the shit you are doing now.

And you are going to wish with all your might you’d done more of it.  

You’re gonna wish you had more selfies, more photos, more videos being dumb with your friends.  You’re going to wish you’d had your hair even higher or your shoes even sparklier.  

Go.  Document the shit out of your ridiculous life.  Fuck trends but if you wanna be trendy, go all in.  Fuck in-groups and subcultures but if one sings to you, do it all.  Be exactly as cool or punk rock or goth or fandom or country or hardcore or hip hop or whatever, and don’t let anyone tell you differently.

Just don’t hurt people.  That’s the only thing you’ll ever genuinely live to regret.

@palejoke tagged: #I mean no offense but why a 40 y/o on the hellsite

I think I have talked about this before, but because life doesn’t end at twenty or thirty or forty or fifty and thinking that folks are going to fall out of social media or that there won’t always be someone your age and my age and twice both of our ages interested in [insert anything, ever] is a very limiting worldview.  

Somewhere there is a sixty-five year old who unironically loves Taylor Swift’s music and a fifty-two year old writing Superwholock fanfic and a ninty year old who absolutely lives for the next episode of Archer and a seventy-one year old that can kick anyone’s ass in k-pop trivia.  There will always be these folks, and all the Internet has done is give fans of all ages a chance to interact in a way that they never had before.

Before BBSes and the Internet and Usenet and the World Wide Web and fanrings and forums and social media, those people would just love it in their own way, in the privacy of their own homes.  But now anyone can make an Ao3 account or a basic fansite or tumbl about whatever they want, and sometimes you’re gonna learn those people are old but they still get it, and sometimes you’re going to find out those folks are still kids, twelve or fourteen at the oldest, and marvel at their maturity and skill and attention to detail.  

And that is rad as hell, that is fucking incredible, that is… whatever the kids are saying these days, hah.

As a corollary to this, the cultural idea that women over forty just kind of… stop? That they no longer have value or beauty or skills or interests beyond the blandly domestic; that they just kind of universally blend into a kind of social wallpaper? Yeah, that’s misogynistic as hell, and it also puts a super toxic pressure on younger women, who are effectively taught that everything they love about themselves has an expiration date unless they can successfully beautify themselves into looking vaguely 35 forever. And I get that it’s something most of us have been indoctrinated into by, oh, pretty much every aspect of TV, films, politics and popular culture, but if you see nothing incongruous and a great deal that’s wonderful about a fortysomething guy like, say, Misha Collins using the fuck out of Twitter, but can’t understand why a woman his age would want to be on tumblr, then that’s probably an excellent starting point to investigate your biases. 

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(via seananmcguire)

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