cassiopeaia:

my favourite thing that lyra does is asking the alethiometer if will is a ‘friend or an enemy’ and when the alethiometer replies ‘he’s a murderer’ she just goes ‘oh okay that’s cool at least he’ll be resourceful, I should stick around him’

tyrannosaurus-trainwreck:

thedrunkencenobite:

Commissioner Gordon: If I shine this light into the sky, a man dressed like Dracula shows up.

Internal Affairs Investigator: I’m not sure how that’s a good use of tax doll-

Commissioner Gordon: He brings us lots of inadmissible evidence.

Are you fucking kidding me?  You know how this would actually go?

Commissioner Gordon: *slaps roof* You know how much overtime I don’t have to pay on account of this bad boy?

Internal Affairs Investigator: Yeah, but still–

Commissioner Gordon: I just turn it on, and instead of paying a whole precinct time-and-a-half to never see their families, a guy dressed as a bat punches whoever we’re looking for a bunch of times and dumps them in the parking lot.

Internal Affairs Investigator:

That’s not–

Commissioner Gordon:

Sometimes I fire it up just to see who we get.  It’s like having a cat that brings you guys with twenty warrants out for their arrest instead of dead birds.

Internal Affairs Investigator:

Okay, but you can’t tell people that.  Like, we can’t say it out loud.

Commissioner Gordon:

So I shouldn’t have told the FBI they could borrow it if they ever feel like clearing their most-wanted list?

pyrrhiccomedy:

animate-mush:

amatara:

I’m pretending all the time to be, kinder, stronger, funnier, more sociable than I am. I guess we’re all like that but it just feels so inadequate.

What’s the difference?

I know it sounds flippant but… certain things are fundamentally performative.  And other things are so close as makes no difference.

Kindness is performative.  Actions are kind, and people are kind by performing those actions.  You can’t “pretend” to be kinder than you are, you can only perform kindness or not perform kindness, and choosing to perform kindness is always worthwhile, no matter how much you may second-guess your motivations.

Strength is so many things.  It takes strength to pretend a strength you don’t feel.  And the way to achieve strength is to exercise it, so long as you do it in enough moderation to not strain or break anything.  Being able to affect strength when necessary while being able to put it down again when that in turn is necessary is healthy.  Everyone starts weight training with the littlest weights.  It’s not fake or pretending to do what you gotta do in any given situation.

Funniness lives in the interlocutor, not in the speaker.  It doesn’t matter how funny you think you are (or think you are pretending to be) – that’s not how it’s measured.  At what point are you “pretending” to be a musician if the music still gets made?  And often what it’s tempting to describe in first person as “pretending” is more accurately described in the third person as “practicing” – which is of course the way you cause things to Be.

Sociability is also performative.  Pretending to be sociable is just…being sociable, despite a disinclination towards it.  It’s making an effort towards something you value.  So long as the effort is not so great that it backfires into resentment, there’s no practical difference.  

Qualities or activities or whatever are no less worthy because you have to actively choose to perform them.  If anything, the worthiness lies in the act of choosing.  It’s not “pretending” – it’s agency.

tl;dr: ain’t nothing wrong with “fake it till you make it.”  A plastic spoon* holds just as much soup as a “real” one

* I keep wanting to talk about semantic domains!  Artifacts are defined by their utility, whereas living things are defined by their identity.  So plastic forks are still forks, but plastic flowers aren’t flowers.  So there’s two pep-talk messages to take away from this: (1) for certain things, the distinction between “fake” and “real” isn’t a relevant one so long as they still get the job done, and (2) the purpose of a living thing is to be the thing that it is.  The idea of a “useless person” is as semantically nonsensical as the idea of “pretend kindness” (or fake cutlery).

I love this post. It illustrates what I think is maybe the key difference between a developing self-identity and a formed self-identity, which is, like…confidence? If you are BEING kind, consistently, if you are prioritizing that over your own comfort or fatigue or even, occasionally, your emotional inclination (because OH MY GOD FUCK THIS GUY, I HAVE HAD IT UP TO HERE–uuughhh, but no, I’m not gonna lash out at him, that won’t accomplish anything, and besides, he’s probably had a bad day, he’s under a lot of stress, I don’t have to be an asshole about this…), guess what? That makes you kind. That is literally what kindness is. Same for patience, same for strength, same for all of this stuff. You got it. You’re doing it. You’re not faking anything. Stop second-guessing yourself and cutting yourself down. Give yourself enough credit to look at your actions and confidently assert to yourself that you are no longer just making things up as you go. 

t-challabackgirl:

You know what’s scary about this age? You can’t even enjoy your down time. You’re socially convinced that every moment you’re spending not doing anything is wasted time. That you always should be working towards something. We forget that it’s okay to have a breather and simply take time to yourself.

prokopetz:

Headcanon: I can muster a cogent argument for why it would make more sense or make for a better story if this were the case

Heartcanon: I don’t have a particular rationale for why this ought to be the case, I just like to imagine it’s true because it gives me the warm fuzzies

Gutcanon: it’s not that I actively want this to be the case – it just unaccountably feels like it should be

Junkcanon: I like to imagine it’s true because it gives me the other kind of warm fuzzies

Spleencanon: I insist that this is the case specifically to spite the author, because, like, fuck you, sir or madam