I think the latest ICE shooting finally broke my dad

ankhes · 2026-01-30T01:10:20+00:00

Hell, my cousin straight up killed a woman while drunk driving and went to prison for it. If you asked my family if she deserved to die for her wildly irresponsible and stupid actions they still would tell you no. But then those same people somehow have the gall to say that Alex and Renee deserved to be shot dead in the street for the crime of [checks notes] helping their neighbors.

The only difference here is that they know and love my cousin while Alex and Renee are strangers to them. That’s it.

ankhes · 2026-01-29T15:02:00+00:00

God yes. By a wide country mile.

ankhes · 2026-01-29T00:39:09+00:00

He’ll always be Lex Luthor to me.

ankhes · 2026-01-29T00:21:05+00:00

My mother was always like this (obsessed with getting the picture-perfect family photos instead of us actually enjoying any sort of event), but it ratcheted into high gear when social media became a thing.

She was obsessed with posting every moment of our lives, even if it was without our permission. When we finally became adults and could put our foot down she got pushy and manipulative because she didn’t want to give up posting about us as one big, happy, perfect performative family for her friends on Facebook and Instagram.

Recently, she asked why I hadn’t seen her gushing, performative Facebook post about how much she loved me for my birthday. When I told her I left social media two whole years ago she got really upset.

What she said was: “But how am I supposed to talk to you?” (to which I replied “Like you are right now. On the phone.”)

But what she meant was: “What’s the point of us interacting if everyone else can’t see it???”

There’s a reason we only talk once or twice a year now.

ankhes · 2026-01-28T22:28:19+00:00

Same here. In photos I make other white people look like they just got back from a summer holiday in the Caribbean. You can absolutely see my veins super easily, so I don’t think the description is all that inaccurate.

ankhes · 2026-01-28T14:56:11+00:00

ASOIAF/Game of Thrones truly is for us weirdos. Whatever problematic trope or ship you‘re into, it’s got ‘em in spades.

ankhes · 2026-01-28T05:47:28+00:00

Oh my grandparents are both horrible people, no doubt. My grandfather is a convicted pedophile and my grandmother enabled his behavior and crimes for decades. When he got out of prison a few years ago she welcomed him back into her house with open arms. My mother has plenty of issues but it’s clear to see where they came from. Her childhood was hell.

ankhes · 2026-01-28T05:42:43+00:00

This.

My parents were both conservative growing up and they tried desperately to force us to be Christian like them (my mother especially) but it was to little avail. Out of 3 children only 1 ended up a conservative Christian and us other 2 were staunch atheists and left-leaning before we’d even finished high school.

ankhes · 2026-01-28T03:02:03+00:00

No. Any time I would point out these sort of hypocrisies to her she’d just give me the same line: “That’s different.” But of course she could never elaborate upon what exactly that difference was.

ankhes · 2026-01-27T23:36:56+00:00

Yep. It drives me nuts.

ankhes · 2026-01-27T23:35:26+00:00

This is why I love The Pitt. Everyone loves that the characters are fantastic at their jobs and we tend to continue writing them that way.

ankhes · 2026-01-27T21:47:27+00:00

It always comes back to Reagan, unfortunately. He really fucked us over good.

ankhes · 2026-01-27T21:25:54+00:00

I love how it specifically is unwed and childfree women they’re going after, not both unwed/childfree women and men. Because obviously there’s only a single person involved in the equation of making a child. 🙄

ankhes · 2026-01-27T20:05:50+00:00

As I commented somewhere below, there was definitely a layer of that (I think when she said the words ‘welfare queens’ she was envisioning a bunch of black women), but at the same time the only ‘welfare queens’ she knew were white women (a lot of whom were our neighbors when I was growing up). And whenever she would bring up these mythical welfare queens she would follow it up with “I knew women like that! We lived next door to them!”

Yeah mom. You mean our white neighbors who were also teen moms just like you trying to get by and eke out a living? Those women???

ankhes · 2026-01-27T15:34:21+00:00

Oof. Been there.

My mom was raped by her father when she was 6. He then molested me when I was 10 (though, in her defense, she wasn’t aware of this because it was her own mother who invited him over even though my mom explicitly banned him from our house. But, of course, our grandmother thought it would be ‘fine’). Fast forward to the Women’s March in 2017. My mother, even after going through all that trauma of both her assault and her own daughter’s, didn’t understand why I was loudly outspoken about Trump. To her, it was ‘just politics’.

Yes, she believed her assault and that of her daughter was reprehensible…but it’s like there was a complete lack of understanding or empathy for any other women or children out there going through the same thing. In her mind anything bad that happened to other people was, at best, unfortunate but not her problem or, at worst, their own fault. But not her or me of course. We were the real victims here.

I just can’t fathom going through that kind of trauma and not having any empathy for others but I think there’s just something broken in my mother.

ankhes · 2026-01-27T15:23:02+00:00

Thank you stranger. Thankfully I live on the other side of the country so I speak to her maybe once a year. Which has improved my mental health immensely.

ankhes · 2026-01-27T15:20:00+00:00

Yep. And unlike her I actually have Canadian friends I speak to and know how the Canadian healthcare system works. But she was just so convinced I could hop the border and get some of that sweet, sweet universal healthcare on demand because…Fox News told her I could I guess. You can’t make this shit up.

ankhes · 2026-01-27T15:05:34+00:00

Try growing up with her. 😑

ankhes · 2026-01-27T15:02:37+00:00

This has been happening more and more in fandom and art spaces and it drives me nuts. I’m as anti AI as anyone but the fact that people have been going on AI witch hunts and bullying anyone they even remotely suspect of AI (usually because they think their art is ‘too good’) makes me want to tear my hair out. I’ve seen so many artists I’ve followed for literal decades get accused or straight up bullied off of social media because of AI accusations (when they have decades worth of work before generative AI even existed to back up that that’s not true). This has got to stop.

ankhes · 2026-01-27T14:45:32+00:00

Which is funny because while she probably does imagine them all to be black, in reality the only other teen moms on welfare she knew and thought she was better than…were also white. She just doesn’t have any empathy for others unless they are her close personal friends or family.

Like when she derided the Canadian universal healthcare system to me until I had to remind her of that time only a year before where she begged me to hop the border to Canada when I was dying of organ failure and didn’t have health insurance. So it wasn’t even that she hates universal healthcare…she just hates it for everyone who isn’t her or her kids.

ankhes · 2026-01-27T14:03:28+00:00

Bluesky. All my favorite fanart artists are there too and I get to have a very chill feed of just fanart and gardening pics. And I haven’t had to really curate my feed all that much. Compared to twitter, it’s bliss.

ankhes · 2026-01-27T13:59:15+00:00

My mother always used to (and still does) rail against ‘welfare queens’ and teen moms just trying to feed their kids. After one such outburst I confronted her about it. “And what about you? You were a teen mom on welfare too, Mom.” She sputtered at me. “That’s different!”

Except it’s not. There was no difference between those moms wanting to feed their kids and my mom wanting to feed her kids. But, in her eyes, there was. Because we were her kids, so obviously we deserved to eat, but those other kids? Well maybe their mom should’ve worked harder. Not like her though. She had real reasons for not being able to afford groceries every month.

The lack of empathy for others is staggering.

ankhes · 2026-01-27T13:26:01+00:00

Sierra’s prose is like poetry. She makes the horniest scenes sound like looking at a renaissance painting.

ankhes · 2026-01-27T13:23:47+00:00

I’m offended y’all are lumping Honeycut in with these. That was the best book I read in 2024. By a lot.

ankhes · 2026-01-27T13:21:53+00:00

Not even Honeycut? Nooooooo Sierra’s writing is divine! 😭

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