has anyone figured out how to be a real person yet

The misuse of the "insult to life itself" quote from Miyazaki on AI burns my yams so bad bc the original context is being disgusted with how a characters movements are dehumanizing to disabled people specifically bc of his empathy for a disabled friend and it's such a sadly rare sentiment, this cognizance of how we casually inflict indignity upon disabled people and how he finds it disgusting, I hate seeing it obfuscated

In the video he sees character animation where the presenter comments on how the AI can be used to model "grotesque movements humans can't even imagine." And Miyazaki immediately mentions that he thought of his physically disabled friend, who struggles with movement, with the implication being that what's "insulting to life itself" is the degradation of people like him to grotesque monsters. Regardless of my feelings about AI art I don't think it's worth obscuring this humane thought process to have a rhetorical weapon

there is a very real tendency of teenagers with anxiety disorders self diagnosing with considerably more stigmatized and impairing mental illnesses (e.g. schizophrenia, DID, personality disorders), but the best response to that isn't to get angry with them for "appropriating" lol. instead you show them coping resources for the problems they're actually having and deemphasize diagnostic categories in general. if an 18 year old is claiming to have alzheimer's, they're probably making an innocent mistake and are in genuine distress. be kind.

Also I think this trend comes, at least in part, from how brushed aside anxiety disorders can be. If your parents and teachers dismiss you with 'oh everyone feels anxious', then inevitably you're going to start thinking that there must be something else going on with you

”You must feel very scared right now; let’s talk about how to help you personally, tailored to your symptoms” will always be more helpful than “stop faking (X) for attention”. If theyre that desperate for attention or an explanation, something is wrong.

matt just fired half the remaining tumblr support staff lmao

from my sources adjacent to tumblr--from which i can spread rumors and insider information freely because i dont give a fuck about ever working in the tech sector--im hearing this round of firings was focused on purging the senior staff, and not just from support but from the entire remaining tumblr workforce. i'm hearing there are about 25 people left.

This is important, people. Please don't scroll past this one.

While I don't think that Tumblr is about to shut down anytime soon, as a fandom old who lost my community and my people when the fandom diaspora happened from LiveJournal, I want to urge that you do something NOW:

I mean this with all my heart. Get this done now. Get set up and find your people now. Tumblr is the home of fandom now, just as LiveJournal was the home of fandom way back. And you could end up losing your fandom home just as easily and quickly as us old LJ people did way back then.

It's a horrible feeling, and most old LJ users still mourn the loss of it to this day.

The rest of this gets a bit long, so it needs to go behind a cut, but please take a moment out of your scrolling to read it.

Vatted by association

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🚨Urgent humanitarian appeal 🚨

Despite the temporary cessation of fire, I am still living in the tent because I found my house a pile of rubble 💔💔 You can imagine spending your whole life in a tent that does not protect from the cold of winter or the heat of summer

Also, my husband still needs a lot of treatment and medicines that I cannot buy due to their high price💔. He also needs to travel to get an eye transplant and treat the nerves in his left hand😭. Please, I need your help and donation urgently Conditions are still very difficult in Gaza and there are no signs of a safe, warm life💔

the thing about being nonbinary is that you really do start to forget that other people have such strict walls around what is and isn’t allowed for genders. i thought we all agreed that we made that up. could you climb out of the cave real quick and feel the sunshine for a minute.

the malgendering aspect of it is especially weird because people will say things to you like “you shouldn’t use that word/do that thing, that’s Only for women” and wait for you to make the logical leap that you should stop/leave, which they want you to say instead of them because then they aren’t being rude, they’re just agreeing with you!

and it makes it clear that their priority is not “affirming your gender” but instead to remove you from their sight as quickly as possible because your genderless existence in relation to something they’ve heavily gendered in their own mind makes them Uncomfortable.

if you’re 26 and older, reblog.

I remember when I was 26. The mastodon hunts were the highlight of my day, and we cheered whenever we made fire...

I wish it wasn’t a hot take that a story in which two characters of any gender prioritize their purely platonic relationship over any other romantic or sexual interests they might have is a textually queer story

A lot of people really don’t understand amatonormativity as another dimension of “there is a right way to love people” that we have to dismantle.

Amatonormativity 101: Amatonormativity, a term coined by Elizabeth Brake, is the very prevalent idea that there is one relationship type that is above all others. This relationship is an exclusive/monogamous, committed, romantic and sexual relationship.

According to amatonormativity, this specific kind of relationship:

This goes hand in hand with heteronormativity, which says that this ideal relationship also has to be straight. But if you remove that part, all the normative forces of amatonormativity still exist. And they suck for just about everyone! Amatonormativity says aromantic and asexual people will never experience the “highest” form of love. It says single people are inherently less happy than people in a romantic relationship and should always be actively looking for one. It says sex without romance or romance without sex are both lacking a fundamental part of an ideal relationship. It says polyamorous people are failing to choose the one person they can be fully devoted to. It says that your monogamous, committed, romantic/sexual partner is the most important person in your life—more important than your family, your best friend you’ve known all your life, etc.

I hope we can all agree that is something queer people, and also people in general, would benefit from dismantling!

Now let me talk about an example of what I was referring to in the original post.

If you’re not familiar, Elementary is a TV series based on the Sherlock Holmes stories. It’s a modern day adaptation featuring Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective for the NYPD, and Joan (rather than John) Watson, his sober companion and eventually detective partner.

Sherlock has many casual sexual relationships with women throughout the series, while Joan has a string of romantic relationships with men. Neither of them is textually queer (although Sherlock feels very aromantic-coded, if unintentionally, and I personally think an aro reading of both characters has merit).

However, the two of them share a relationship that defies amatonormativity. Sherlock and Joan share almost every part of their lives together—first because Joan is monitoring Sherlock to help maintain his sobriety, but soon because they have actively chosen to remain in each other’s lives. They eventually become partners as detectives but are also functionally life partners, living together, sharing their resources, taking care of each other emotionally and physically. At multiple turning points in the story, they express their love for each other. Throughout this progression, their relationship never becomes romantic or sexual. While Sherlock continues to have casual sex and Joan continues to go on dates, it’s clear that Sherlock and Joan remain each other’s most important person.

This relationship defies amatonormativity, and in my opinion that makes it queer. Queer as in breaking boundaries, defying norms, challenging the idea that there is any right or wrong way to love someone.

Now it’s time for my real hot take. There is a reason I used Elementary as an example, instead of the many other pieces of fiction that have a very similar dynamic between two characters of the same gender.

Those stories—stories that center a platonic relationship between two characters of the same gender, a relationship that remains platonic but is deep, devoted, and prioritized over other relationships in the character’s lives—are textually queer. They are not textually gay (although yes, many of them are subtextually gay). But that does not stop them from being queer stories.

If you want to read into whatever subtext might be there and interpret that relationship as a gay romantic/sexual relationship, that's great. But I wish more people shared my opinion that this is not making a previously normative story into a queer one. Usually, it’s trading heteronormativity for amatonormativity, creating a relationship that defies different norms.

I’m not saying that one or the other interpretation is more valuable (in general—which one is most meaningful to you is a personal preference). I think they’re both queer interpretations of the story. However, given how often stories like the ones I’m describing get accused of “queerbaiting” or simply “not being canonically queer,” I’m pretty sure my opinion on this is not widely shared.

In conclusion: Queerness is a much broader set of concepts than just gay romance. We should consider amatonormativity another dimension of oppression that queerness is in opposition to. Ship or don’t ship whatever is more fun or meaningful to you but please don’t assign moral righteousness to one kind of queerness while erasing another. Also, please be nice to aro and ace people, we already have enough to deal with. I wish none of this was a hot take. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

I've gotten multiple responses to this post that are basically along the lines of, "I mostly agree with this, but calling close platonic relationships 'queer' still feels weird to me. That's not what 'queer' usually means and I don't know if I'd use it to describe relationships like this."

And like. I appreciate that people are listening to my point and being receptive to it, even if it feels a little Out There to them! I genuinely appreciate the folks who aren't sure they get this but are hearing me out.

But I also keep wanting to be like. Yeah, that's my point!

We don't use 'queer' to describe platonic relationships but I think we should. (Or at least, should be able to, when it fits the circumstances!) I know, and I acknowledge directly in the post, that this is not a widely accepted usage of the term. I am arguing for an expansion of the term.

I can only make guesses as to what people with this kind of reluctance are feeling, but my best guess is that they're used to "queer" (or at least "queer relationship") being used mostly in reference to gay/lesbian/same-gender love and attraction. A lot of people mostly associate the word "queer" with gay romance. And while that's a big subset of queer experiences, honestly, I think it's a shame that it's often the only type of queer experience that gets talked about.

Queer is an umbrella term for a reason! Is there any reason "queer relationships" shouldn't include, say, friendships between queer/trans people? Or romantic/sexual relationships that could be considered straight, but include one or more trans people? Or, as I make the argument above, relationships that are breaking down the normative ideas of what kinds of relationships a person is "allowed" to have, regardless of whether the people involved are themselves queer?

Maybe that last one is a leap for some people, and you think that a relationship can't be queer if the people in it don't identify with any of the LGBTQ+ labels. I understand that reservation, but honestly, I think that there's so much social pressure against non-normative relationships that people who break them should get to be considered queer / in a queer relationship if they want, and that we should get to apply queer interpretations to characters in that kind of relationship as well.

(Also, like, a lot of people in non-normative relationships are in fact queer, especially aromantic and asexual. But if we aspecs can have fun with our queer friendships and queerplatonic relationships, I don't see why anyone else shouldn't be able to!)

Anyway, all that to say that if this is pushing your definition of queer a little bit, good! That's what I was trying to do! And I hope people come away from this a little more open to the idea.

If you still aren't really convinced, that's okay. If it doesn't change what you personally use the word "queer" for, I hope you still get something else out of this post—like learning about amatonormativity and starting to see it around you, or considering friendships in media through a queer / anti-amatonormative lens of analysis when it feels relevant. (Or just being more chill about aro and ace people in fandoms who don't ship your ships. Please. We would really appreciate it.)

And I just want to say, while I'm here: Thank you for the incredible response to this post. It's just over 10k notes as I'm posting this and I'm so happy that so many people are interested in this topic & my thoughts on it (and so grateful that the response has been 99.99% positive so far). To all the aspec folks who have told me I've put something into words that you never could—thank you, I'm truly honored and I love you all 💜💚. To all the people who have told me I've opened their eyes to something new—thank you for being curious and willing to learn! And to all the people who still don't get it but are here anyway—thank you for listening to what I had to say. I'm glad you're here.

a lot of loving and being loved by people is recognizing when they're sincerely trying to help or comfort you even if their words are clunky and unhelpful at best and holding onto the sentiment that they are trying to reach for you at all. and a lot of the time that has to be enough because it's all you're going to get

Kyoto 京都 // JiYeon 지연

Having a bad day? I got this for you:

maybe its because im an asylum seeker but i am of the opinion that even if immigrants and asylum seekers contributed nothing to a nation that nation should not have the right to deport them.

"oh now no-one will do these jobs," well i think its bad that we take advantage of immigrants and asylum seekers' desperation to force them into exploitative jobs that the ordinary citizen is entirely unwilling to put up with.

me checking this dumb stupid idiot app everyday like there's a daily login bonus