#interests

dinosaurrainbowstarfish:

lady-of-fandoms:

feministsexworker:

wyldwoodfaye:

ithotyouknew:

I put on my Tinder profile that I hate sports, I don’t drink beer and I’m 150% feminine all day all the time and so many guys are like…offended? One guy was like “what if the guy you like loves sports, you won’t even watch with him?” And I asked “will you wake up at 8am during fashion week to watch live streams of shows with me because that’s what I’m really interested in. And he said “I don’t really find that interesting.” And I’m like THEN WHY THE FUCK WOULD I CARE ABOUT SPORTS FOR YOU OMG. 

this isn’t an isolated thing. women are expected to change for men. if you don’t want to have children (ever) then someone is bound to say to you: well, what if your husband wants to have children? i was thinking about dyeing my hair & my dad says, what if the guy you’re dating doesn’t like it? we’re expected to lose weight & to dress in a certain way to appeal to men. we’re expected to be less opinionated, less assertive, less talented when competing against a man… it never fucking ends.

DO YOU AND WEED OUT THE WEAK MEN

I needed this, was literally thinking about getting into sports for a guy recently, don’t know what I was thinking lol

it’s totally fine to get into sports for a guy! As long as he’s also willing to get into your interests!

The issue is when you’re expected to get into sports, but he doesn’t ask you about your interests or watch fashion week with you.

Healthy relationships mean all parties involved being genuinely interested in their partner(s) lives.

It’s also totally fine to agree to both do you and have completely separate hobbies!

The issue is when any expectation is one-sided in a relationship, because that means that someone in the relationship thinks of themselves as the “superior” partner–and that’s never a good thing.

Being mutually willing to explore each other’s interests is so important! The best and most fulfilling relationship I’ve been in to date involved me watching loads of march madness (I like basketball but like… I care about one team, and only sorta. March madness is a shit ton of basketball) and him watching RuPaul’s Drag Race All-Stars Season 2. Neither one of us really knew what was going on, but we both asked questions and genuinely tried to become interested in each other’s interest. I still don’t know why Duke playing like shit is the end of the world, and he still doesn’t know why I feel like Tatianna was cheated, mom, by rolaskatox, which was in full effect, but I know that he has a man crush on Frank Jackson, and he knows that Katya is my favorite queen. The point is, we both tried, and just seeing someone try means so much, even if you don’t really become interested yourself. Humans just like to share what makes them feel, which is amazing. This is too long now.

Anyway.

I’m interested in many things but only for a short period of time. Like, I have an idea and get really excited and the next week I couldn’t care less. This is why I have a huge collection of equipment for potential hobbies and activities in my apartment. There are calligraphy books, wool and stuff for knitting, watercolors, books for learning Swedish and Italian, a wicca altar with candles and herbs, an e-piano, dead plants, an empty aquarium, a makeup desk full of lipsticks and highlighters I’ve never put on, tools for making jewelry…the list goes on. And the only thing I’m using is my Netflix account.

supporting-character:

lesbianfairie:

IDs:

First is a tweet from Swamp Which Advice @ SwampAdvice, “Here is the secret about things you love. If you put them down you can always pick them back up again. You can always paint again, sew again, hike again, play music again, read that book again, watch the movie. ‘But it’s been so long.’ The thing you love doesn’t care.”

Second is a tweet from Louise Miller @ louisethebaker, “I’m almost 50, and here is the best thing I have learned so far: every strange thing you’ve ever been into, every failed hobby or forgotten instrument, everything you have ever learned will come back to you, will serve you when you need it. No love, however brief, is wasted.” /end

anewhope:

friendship is dragging your friends into your hyperfixations so you don’t suffer alone

puppyships-moved:

People who have more than one f/o from the same source are the most powerful bitches in this community

ikealanterns:

pleeeeeaaaaase don’t make fun of people for being overenthusiastic about their interests. if you see someone getting really excited about something and you think it’s a good idea to ruin their fun (and don’t think people don’t notice your eye rolls and side glances) you’re an asshole

Stephanie -  IG @_ST3PHANIE.G - is the latest model to hit the runway as a model for the illustrious AMD Candi

In just a few short weeks, Stephanie has already appeared in photoshoots, multiple events and is even featured in Manhattan for All-Star Weekend. Before she ships out, I met with her for a coffee date and was able to get some of the real questions you want to know about her.

Why AMD Candi and what led you to this point?

I chose to join AMD Candi because I saw a lot of potential and can see myself growing with this company.

Tell us about your personality 

I’m a very smart, fun and outgoing girl that likes to have a good time anywhere she goes. Very optimistic and determined to reach all my goals.

What message do you wish to spread to the world? 

That you should never give up on your dreams, because it’s all until that one day. Hard work will pay off eventually, so if times get difficult keep trying! 

Any other major ventures you're involved in? 

I teach dance to younger girls ages 4-16 for pageants , shows etc. I also offer choreography for sweet 16s, weddings and many other events.

What are some of your smaller, casual hobbies and interests? 

I love to read, dance, take pictures lol and spend time with my family.

Tell us about your style? 

My style is very versatile I can go from a very sporty look to a grown sexy look. I like to switch it up and keep it unpredictable. 

How long have you been interested in modeling? 

I’ve been interested in modeling since I was a little girl and started when I did a big pageant and actually won.

What are your goals and where do you see yourself in 8 months? 

My goals is to create a stable lifestyle for myself where I’m happy everyday and wake up with no complaints about what I do for work. I see myself working on major deals and one step further towards my goals in 8 months.

What is something about you that sets you apart from everybody else? 

I would have to say the way I handle situations, no matter how hard life gets I keep going with a very optimistic view.

Favorite music? 

I’m a music fanatic period. I listen to everything but I would have to say R & B.

Favorite work-out? 

Tiffany Rothe’s.

For events, photoshoots and other bookings: email [email protected]

Becoming an adult INTP means being able to channel your obsessions in a more productive way.

three–rings:

three–rings:

three–rings:

rev-another-bondi-blonde:

In 2006 a high school English teacher asked students to write a famous author and ask for advice. Kurt Vonnegut was the only one to respond - and his response is magnificent: “Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:

I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.

Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

God bless you all!

Kurt Vonnegut

Nimbus Publishing and Vagrant Press Goose Lane Editions Breakwater Books Ltd. The Acorn Press Bouton d'or Acadie Canada Council for the Arts | Conseil des arts du Canada

When I was 15 I spent a month working on an archeological dig.  I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports?  What’s your favorite subject?   And I told him, no I don’t play any sports.  I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.  

And he went WOW.  That’s amazing!  And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.” 

And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them.  I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”

And that honestly changed my life.  Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them.  I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them. 

It seems a lot of people have found my little story (as well as the incredible Vonnegut’s advice) helpful, so I thought I’d add a little.  Because the thing is, at the TIME, when I was 15, I  thought Mr. Archeologist was wrong.  I thought he was just being nice.  I was sure that actually, the point was still to find that One Thing you are Naturally Talented at and do it.  Even if I went on to do musicals and stuff just because I enjoyed it and let go of felling bad about it. I quit writing at 23 because I was shitty at it.  (Hint, I’m 41 and back at it, much improved.)

I taught myself to sew about ten years ago and within a year was making elaborate costumes to wear to cons.  People always told me how “talented” I was at sewing.  And I always said I was not born knowing how to operate a sewing machine.  I couldn’t sew a straight line of stitches for MONTHS. (I’m still not super good at that!)  But I enjoyed it, so I kept at it until I could make the things I wanted to make.

Life is about finding the things you ENJOY, not the things you’re good at.  If you enjoy something, you will GET better at it, because you will keep doing it. But as Mr. Vonnegut makes clear so eloquently, being good at something isn’t necessary for it to feed your soul. 

So, I was aware that this post had been misattributed and was making rounds on facebook and twitter, but now The Chive has picked it up and attributed my words to Kurt Vonnegut. 

And look, making ad revenue from other people’s content is what they do, but the very least they could do is get the source right or post an accurate screenshot. 

Mr. Vonnegut, whose work I have adored for years, is no longer alive to correct this mistake and I feel more than a little guilty that people think he would write something so boring and unwitty as my little story.  (Which yes, is true, happened to me, and so it’s very odd to read people react as if a Great Man wrote this.)  (Also how much more people value a thing if a Famous Man wrote something than an anonymous woman on the internet.)

So I have contacted The Chive to inform them of this, but I don’t know if they will acknowledge it at all.  In the meantime, please share this correct source, and if you see it making the rounds, correct the attribution. 

Also I have a Ko-fi link on my homepage if anyone has maybe enjoyed this or shared the incorrect version without being aware.  I’m unemployed and disabled and currently have no income coming in, so, yanno.

vampirismes:

stop shaming people for being passionate about the things that they love. stop mocking people for having unusual interests. like, honestly, i’m so tired of feeling embarrassed for being “too much”. if being too much means having deep interests that fill my life with romanticism and excitement, then let me be!!! i’d much rather listen to anyone ranting about their latest obsession with 16th century swords than have a boring ordinary conversation with those who shame passionate people

azcrowleyfell:

mycroftrh:

autisticchangeling:

autisticchangeling:

I’ve seen discussions sometimes about how fanfiction-based fandom culture is heavily influenced and dominated by people who are not cis men.

One thing I haven’t seen discussed as much though is how much of fandom in general is shaped by neurodivergent people.

I mean, you have autistic and ADHD people with special interests or hyperfixations collecting information and writing detailed meta, connecting very strongly with characters and fandoms. I would not be surprised if the percentage of autistics in fandom communities was significantly higher than in the general public.

And that’s not even getting into other types of neurodivergencies and how they influence fandom culture.

I sometimes see people try to divorce fandom culture from the idea of being a “geek”, and I understand that this is sometimes because of the association with the sexist geek stereotype, but I also know that there is a connection between the two concepts, and it’s probably us neurodivergent people.

I also think this is why at first I was like “my fandoms can’t be special interests, that’s just how fandom is”

Yeah, because a lot of people in fandom have special interests

I’ll go slightly further here, and say this (well. this plus ableism) is the root of a lot of current issues in fandom.

Back when I started being in fandom, a couple decades ago, I’d argue that damn near every single person in fandom was autistic or ADHD.  You’d only join fandom if you were obsessive and were chill with doing things that weren’t socially acceptable.  (Because being a fan absolutely was not socially acceptable at the time!  We went to ridiculous amounts of effort to hide that we were fans!)

And fandom culture was absolutely shaped by this.  The standard behaviors in fandom were those of happy autistics.  That’s how you were expected to act.  You remember “squeeing”?  The visual image of it is generally someone so happy and excited they can’t physically contain it so they make a high-pitched noise and flap their hands and - a squee is literally just a happy stim. And so many fans at the time did happy stims that we gave it a special fandom name!  So even if a neurotypical person happened to stumble in, they’d learn that the “social norm” in a fandom space is basically just “act autistic/ADHD” and assimilate.

But then… fandom got mainstreamed.  It became socially acceptable.  And then the neurotypicals started showing up in large numbers.  And instead of assimilating like they did before, when they were the minority, now that there were a lot of them they started going “what the heck is this! why are people here acting so weird!  this is embarrassing!”

…and then we got cringe culture within fandom.

No one says “squee” anymore not because fans don’t squee anymore - happy stims don’t just go away - but because the neurotypicals showed up and told us “squee” is a cringy word and concept.  Which they had ALWAYS told us out in public, but we used to have fandom as an insular autistic/ADHD-dominated space where we were safe and free to be ourselves.

You know how everybody talks about how cringy and embarrassing 2012 tumblr was?  Dude.  We were literally just acting like happy autistics, because that’s what we were.  It’s just that - like you always have - you think autistic/ADHD behavior is cringy and embarrassing.

This isn’t new.  “Cringe culture” isn’t new.  It’s just a new euphemism for the exact same ableism that’s always existed, with the only difference that now it’s coming from insidefandom.

All those posts saying “if these people were bullied more they wouldn’t act like this”?  They’re not just bizarrely tasteless jokes.  They’re because the people making those posts werebullies. Are bullies.  Fandom used to be where the sort of people who were victims of peer abuse went - where we went to be safe from bullies and be openly ourselves - but now the bullies are in here with us.

On the happier side, while mainstreaming has resulted in a lot of neurotypicals showing up, autistic/ADHD people are absolutely still the backbone of fandom.  We’re the ones collecting tiny bits of info and connecting the dots to write galaxy brain meta.  We’re the ones churning out new content every single day, rain or shine.  We’re the hyper-verbal ones writing 250k fics and the ones who hyper-relate with the characters and make incorrect quote posts so spot-on they sound canon. They may think we’re embarrassing - but they still need us.

SO MUCH THIS!!!

Fandom would be nothingwithout neurodivergent people. Because there’s nothing on this earth that can rival the white-hot intensity of an Autistic or ADHD person in full-blown hyperfocus or special interest mode.

chaoskyan:

primarybufferpanel:

fuckingconversations:

superherogrl:

chaoskyan:

I grew up hearing the phrase “you never stick with anything, what’s the point” a lot. I’ve always been attracted towards seemingly disconnected interests, and gone through phases of being really into something. But eventually my interest would fade and I would move onto something else. 

Or at least that’s always how it’s been phrased for me, by others. Now I realize that my interest for the old thing didn’t fade so much as my interest for something new outshined it, and that’s vastly different. 

I was always made to feel bad about it, with every abandoned endeavour I was told I needed to stop starting things if I wasn’t going to stick with them. I was told I was wasting time and money picking up these random interests and abandoning them after a year. 

So eventually, I stopped picking things up. I told myself “what’s the point, I’m going to give up in a year anyway”. Even worse, I started dismissing every new interest, because I had no way of knowing if my interest was “real” enough or just another passing phase. I stopped trying new things, I stopped looking up stuff that piqued my curiosity, and having chronic depression made it really easy to leave everything on the dirty floor of neglected ideas. The more they piled up, the more depressing it was. All these things that could be nice, but I just can’t take care of them. 

I realize now how bullshit that kind of thinking is. So what if I stopped doing karate after a year? That’s one more year of karate than most people I know. And in that year I learned discipline, I learned to listen to a teacher, something I had never done before in all my years of private education. I learned the true meaning of respect, that it’s something you do out of faith at first and maintain as it’s reciprocated, not something you do blindly and regardless of how you’re treated. 

It gave me the foundation for the determination and grounding I needed to practice yoga. Another year. Not enough to be good at it maybe, but again a year more than most people I know and a year that is not lost, but gained. I learned balance, I learned to listen to my body, I learned how to let go of emotional tightness through physical stretching. 

And then iaido, only a few weeks because I couldn’t afford to keep going. The year of yoga I had done a couple years previous had given me a better starting point than the other newcomers to the class. I already had balance, I had strength in my legs and I had better posture. In those months I learned the importance of precision, the true definition of efficacy, the zen state that is incessant repetition. 

Did I practice long enough to get good at iaido, and yoga, and karate? No. Of course not. It takes years to become proficient and decades to master any of those things, but I learned other skills and those skills were an invaluable part of my growth both spiritually and emotionally. Likewise for my forays into painting, sewing, graphic design, film. I’m a photography student now heading into my second year of school, and every single second of practice I have in those other disciplines has given me more experience in those areas and made learning easier. 

Skills carry over. They intersect and connect in ways that are sometimes unexpected. Nothing is ever lost, experience is never a waste of time or worthless or stupid. Allow your focus to wander, reflect on what you learn, and consider how you can keep using it in other aspects of your life. Stop telling people their interests aren’t worth their time. 

‘A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one’

^^^^The real jack of all trades quote if anyone’s i interested.

For a week I was super into making LED arrays. 

For a few months I was really into costume makeup. 

For a year I was into sewing clothes

For a few months I was into sculpting and molding and casting

I’ve always had a sustained interest in animals, but the hyperfocus on birds in particular made me very familiar with feather formations. 

Couple months I loved the idea of engineering moving sculptures. 

Add all that together, and hot diggity shit, that’s some SOLID basework for making costumes, cosplay, and other impressive props.

—–

For a week I was into welding and took a welding class.

A year of interest in woodworking and fiddling with the tools means I’m fairly good at that as well. 

Add that to the engineering from earlier and the focus on balance and stable structures means I can make my own furniture - Couches, shelves, desks, just give me the material and tools and I can make it happen. 

—

Brief interest in business law meant two classes taken in college, and an accidental qualification for a business degree. 

Those same classes let me point out some serious litigation bait in a friend’s startup company. 

—-

A wide array of interests means I also have a TON of little nitpicky facts about how the world works, which translates into amazing immersive writing. 

I know how it feels to use a chisel, and the delicate precision of electronics. I know the smell of forests and barns and old yarn being put to use again. The bloody smell of a freshly slaughtered chicken, and the anticipatory fear moments before skydiving. 

The pattern of a bad weld and a good one, and the careful calculation of load bearing walls when building underground. 

Anyway, this world is HUGE and really cool. Why on earth would I want to stick to learning ONE thing, when there’s HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of things I could learn?

For anybody still struggling with this, I highly recommend this book:

Sorry for reblogging my own post (again), but this is another awesome addition to it, and there have been several people commenting who have also read this book or went out to get it at @primarybufferpanel‘s suggestion and are loving it. 

And for all of you saying “I needed this post”, check the comments! There are some really beautiful replies and encouraging stories that people have shared.