Never settle for anything or anyone

Never fucking settle.

I can’t stress this enough.

In my 24 years of life, I want this to be the one thing that I have learned better than all other lessons. If a boy asks if you are okay, knowing that you are not, and leaves it alone when you say “yes” please leave. If your best friend is having a bad night and you make her food, lay with her and let her cry on your shoulder and the next week does not do the same thing for you when you are crippled from pain at 3 in the morning, please realize she is not your friend. If your parents invite you over for dinner but antagonize you for dying your hair a new color the moment you walk through the door, please go home and do not let them control you.

Don't let other people determine your worth. Don't let a boy tell you that you aren't worth it. You are. Don't put yourself out there for friends that won't do the same for you. Don't put up with toxic family members that expect you to change yourself for their own comfort. Silence the voices that tell you "no" and that you aren't strong enough. Look in the mirror and tell yourself you are more than enough, you're too good for those toxic relationships.

Please realize that no matter who the person is nor their level of importance to you, you do not deserve it. You do not need people in your life who do not appreciate you or what you do. You do not need to belittle yourself just to make others happy. You need to keep yourself at the top of your priority list.

For fuck’s sake, you are all you fucking have. You’re it. You’re everything. It’s all you, baby.

Please, just fucking make the most of it and fuck the rest.

What is Fandom?

Fandom is focus. Fandom is obsession. Fandom is insatiable consumption. Fandom is sitting for hours in front of a TV screen a movie screen a computer screen with a comic book or a novel in your lap. Fandom is eyestrain and carpal tunnel syndrome and not enough exercise and staying up way, way past your bedtime.

Fandom is people you don’t tell your mother you’re meeting. Fandom is people in the closet, people out and proud, people in costumes, people in T-shirts with slogans only fifty others would understand. Fandom is a loud dinner conversation scaring the waiter and every table nearby.

Fandom is you in Germany and me in the US and him in Australia and her in Japan. Fandom is a sofabed in New York, a roadtrip to Oxnard, a friend behind a face in London. Fandom talks past timezones and accents and backgrounds. Fandom is conversation. Communication. Contact.

Fandom is drama. Fandom is melodrama. Fandom is high school. Fandom is Snacky’s law and Godwin’s law and Murphy’s law. Fandom is smarter than you. Fandom is stupider than you. Fandom is five arguments over and over and over again. Fandom is the first time you’ve ever had them.

Fandom is female. Fandom is male. Fandom lets female play at being male. Fandom bends gender, straight, gay, prude, promiscuous. Fandom is fantasy. Fandom doesn’t care about norms or taboos or boundaries. Fandom cares too much about norms and taboos and boundaries. Fandom is not real life. Fandom is closer than real life. Fandom knows what you’re really like in the bedroom. Fandom is how you would never, could never, be in the bedroom.

Fandom is shipping, never shipping, het, slash, gen, none of the above, more than the above. Fandom is love for characters you didn’t create. Fandom is recreating the characters you didn’t create. Fandom is appropriation, subversion, dissention. Fandom is adoration, extrapolation, imitation. Fandom is dissection, criticism, interpretation. Fandom is changing, experimenting, attempting.

Fandom is creating. Fandom is drawing, painting, vidding: nine seasons in four minutes of love. Fandom is words, language, authoring. Fandom is essays, stories, betas, parodies, filks, zines, usenet posts, blog posts, message board posts, emails, chats, petitions, wank, concrit, feedback, recs. Fandom is writing for the first time since you were twelve. Fandom is finally calling yourself a writer.

Fandom is signal and response. Fandom is a stranger moving you to tears, anger, laughter. Fandom is you moving a stranger to speak.

Fandom is distraction. Fandom is endangering your job, your grades, your relationships, your bank account. Fandom gets no work done. Fandom is too much work. Fandom was/is just a phase. Fandom could never be just a phase. Fandom is where you found a friend, a sister, a kindred spirit. Fandom is where you found a talent, a love, a reason.

Fandom is where you found yourself.

Robots in space are magical

We spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering “Is there anybody out there?” Hoping and guessing and imagining.

We, as a species, were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species. We wanted to talk to them. We wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe.

And then we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us— we got scared that we were going to blow each other up. We got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently. We got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them

Then...

Then we built robots.

We gave them names. We gave them brains made out of silicon. We pretended they were people and we told them, "Hey you wanna go exploring?" And of course they did, because we had made them in our own image.

Maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more. Maybe the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead. And if other people come from the stars, we won’t be around to meet them and say, "Hi! How are you? We’re people, too! You’re not alone any more!"

Maybe we’ll be gone.

But we built robots. Robots who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names. If the other people come and say, "Who were these people? What were they like?"

The robots can say, "When they made us, they called us Discovery. They called us Curiosity. They called us Explorer. They called us Spirit. They must have thought that was important.

"And they told us to tell you hello."

And that's why our robots are amazing.