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Bliss

@callmebliss / callmebliss.tumblr.com

If you get a reply from me and aren’t sure why, it’s probably that you replied to one of my side blogs
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I'm part of a wood carving club and there are a lot of dads who are dripping with adhd/autism vibes who's special interest is wood carving. One of the master skill level carvers who we'll call... Jim was working on a figure of a super heroine, who was frankly outrageously bodacious. Several women in the club are uncomfortable with this. They tell me they wish he wouldn't carve stuff like that at the club. This is understandable. I felt a bit uneasy too. I ask if they told him, and they say no.

This goes on for months. He's at a point where he's carving the folds of her skin tight suit. It's shockingly impressive. A real Giovanni Strazza with wood here. Many of the women in the club, (also boomers) have stopped talking to him because they're offended.

One afternoon I see a woman we'll call Karen approach him and have this conversation Her: Wow that is really starting to look like actual fabric. Him: Thanks! It's been a really fun challenge. Her: I bet! She sure is - a lot- huh? Him: Yeah a lot of these comic book characters are really outrageously proportioned! Her: They really are! You know, when I was carving a sign that was political in a way i knew would offend some people here, I just felt so much more comfortable carving it at home. Him: *nodding* Her: Okay? Him: Yeah I get that. Her: Yeah. Okay. Good luck with her!" *she walks off and he looks a little confused.* Next week at the meet up Jims working on it again and Karen's furious. Says to me "He said he wouldn't bring it back! So RUDE." So I go up to him and we have this conversation. Me: Hey Jim Him: Hey Neala Me: Some of the ladies around here are feeling a little uncomfortable with the figure you're carving because of her massive cartoon titties. Him: Ah shit, really? I thought they just thought it was funny. Me: Yeah folks laugh a lot when they're uncomfortable and trying to hide it. Him: Mm, yeah and I can never tell which laugh is which. Me: Me either Him: Well I won't work on this here anymore. I have other projects to do. Me: Hey thanks! I wanna see it when you're done tho so take a pic for me, okay? Him: Haha sure! I go sit down. Karen is shocked. Jim puts the figure away and works on a carving of a crane instead. He is not upset.

A week later I over hear Karen telling her friend I screamed at Jim last week.

Another event at the same club. All names fake. Even mine but u only know me by the fake name so

A carver who does a lot of work for the group comes in with a stunning leather bag. When I say a lot of work for the group, I mean a LOT a lot. He plans out monthly projects, makes the blanks for them and shows the rest of the club how to do the carvings. Lets call him Harold.

So I'm gushing over the bags, and so are a few others. He tells us he made these bags himself and that he's really gotten into leather working over the last year. Jim is complementary of the bags, and teasingly says "Woodcarving and now Leather? You know what they say? Jack of all trades, Master of none!"

Now this quote takes on a different meaning coming from someone who is literally a master skill level carver ways it to someone who is not. But he says it in a jokey way. Clearly meant to playfully rib. Thing is, I see the tightness in Harolds eyes when Jim says this. Having Adhd myself, I also hobby hop a lot and know how it feels to be teased about it. Maybe I was projecting as i flashed back to every time someone had told me to "Just stick with" something.

I say, "Go on Jim, finnish the poem!" In a playful way. Jim laughs and shrugs and says he didn't know there was more. I quote the whole thing, "Jack of all trades master of none but still always better than a master of one." Everyone laughs in a good-natured way, Harold visibly relaxes.

Later, Jim tells me i hurt his feelings. He says it felt like i was belittling him for only being good at one thing. I apologize and explain that he had inadvertently hurt my feelings and that I suspected he had hurt Harold's because it felt like he was saying we weren't good at anything because we have multiple hobbies.

He apologized and said he was feeling a little jealous that Harold is good at so many things, and all he's good at is woodcarving. He also went on to say that if Harold entered any of his carvings into any competitions, he would probably have the same rank as him. Harold just didn't do competitions.

At this point Harold overheard and thanked Jim for what he had said, and told him that he didn't enter competitions because as soon as he started doing that with the goal of achieving a certain rank the hobby stopped being fun for him and he no longer wanted to do it and internally I was like "Ahhh i also have pathologic demand avoidance! Me too."

And everything is fine now.

Nature documentary voice "Here we see the interaction between the autistic adult, who has had one special interest that has lasted his whole life, and some Adhd adults, who have collected many special interests over their lives. They are accidentally hurting one anothers feelings about it."

to this day i cannot BELIEVE aang called up and blew off like nine avatars just because they didnt offer any vegan options to ending the war

roku: my best friend assaulted me as a senior citizen :(

kyoshi: sometimes some murder is OK

kuruk: just punch people that disagree with you

aang: okay i’m starting to think that none of you took this avatar thing seriously

You're not wrong

Aang when he is told he’s the Avatar at age 12: *has a melt down because he understands the seriousness of this function and the consequences his new responsibilities will have on his personal life* 

other Avatars at age 16: I’m the avatar? Cool! Hey look it comes with a glowing eyes feature! 

aang: fuck this noise, i’ll get advice from the last air nomad avatar

yangchen: i gave up that hippie bullshit first chance i got, i love murder

I will never not laugh at the bit where Aang is like "finally, an Air Nomad, you get me, right?" and Yangchen just says "sorry bud, I also vote murder".

A close second on that note is of course the trial of Kyoshi in which she manifests in the courtroom just to say "Actually, I did murder him and I'd do it again. But consider: the bitch had it coming".

And the fact that he figures out a more technically complex and socially stable way to remove Ozai without making him a martyr just shows that he has a lot more skill at the problem at hand than most the previous ones.

To me, that whole scene was very much the previous avatars saying “when all you have is a hammer” and Aang going “okay, but what can I do with this Swiss Army knife?” and they don’t give very useful advice about it.

I will die on this hill, none of the Avatars said to kill Ozai.

Aang, and you, just read it that way, because they were being more philosophical and less practical than might be hoped.

Roku: In my life, I tried to be disciplined and show restraint, but it backfired when Fire Lord Sozin took advantage of my restraint and mercy. If I had been more decisive and acted sooner, I could have stopped Sozin and stopped the war before it started. I offer you this wisdom, Aang: You must be decisive.

Kyoshi: In my day, Chin the Conqueror threatened to throw the world out of balance. I stopped him. And the world entered a great era of peace. ... I would have done whatever it took to stop Chin. I offer you this wisdom, Aang: Only justice will bring peace.

Kuruk: When I was young, I was always a go-with-the-flow kind of Avatar. People seemed to work out their own problems, and there was peace and good times in the world. But then, I lost the woman I loved to Koh, the Face Stealer. It was my fault. If I had been more attentive and more active, I could've saved her. Aang, you must actively shape your own destiny and the destiny of the world.

Yangchen: Many great and wise Air Nomads have detached themselves and achieved spiritual enlightenment, but the Avatar can never do it. Because your sole duty is to the world. Here is my wisdom for you: Selfless duty calls you to sacrifice your own spiritual needs, and do whatever it takes to protect the world.

What the Avatars actually told Aang was, "you cannot hide from this, you cannot run away and pretend this isn't happening, you can't stall and hope someone else will fix it for you."

And he didn't.

He was decisive, he brought justice (not vengeance!), he shaped the destiny of the world (like, a lot) and did what it took to protect it!

Maybe they couldn't think of a way to do it that wasn't murder, we're not in their heads, but they left the option open for Aang to come up with another way. As long as you save the world, you're good. But you have to save the world.

I feel like I've made this post before, but here it is again.

Bro, this was on the bottom of the back of a 40 pound TV with another 40 pounds of hifi equipment stacked on top, underneath a tangle of dusty takeout menus and nigh-identical cables one of whose ends is probably plugged into something. You did it by feel, leaning over the whole pile while trying to put so much weight that the card table collapses on your foot again.

And the light never reached back there quite right so white and yellow looked the same even if you could crane your neck and shove your head back there.

And then you had to do it all over again because you plugged them into the input that actually doesn't work for no reason, so you have to hunt for the other set of ports.

And then you have to figure out what channel to change the TV to to recognize your new input.

And then there's a good chance you're suddenly deafened by differing volume settings on the new device you just plugged in while your cheek was smushed against the TV so you could reach the back to plug those cables in.

On the issue of the ‘q slur’...

So, yesterday, I got into a rather stupid internet argument with someone who was peddling what seemed to me to be a rather insidious narrative about slur-reclamation. Someone in the ensuing notes raised a point which I thought was interesting, and worrying, and probably needed to be addressed in it’s own post. So here we go:

The word ‘queer’ itself seems to be especially touchy for many, so let me begin to address this by way of analogy.

Instead of talking about “queer”, let’s start by talking about “Jew” - a word which I believe is very similar in its usage in some significant ways.

Now, the word “Jew” has been used as a derogatory term for literally hundreds of years. It is used both as a noun (eg. “That guy ripped me off - what a dirty Jew”) and as a verb (eg. “That guy really Jew-ed me”). These usages are deeply, fundamentally, horrifically offensive, and should be used under no circumstances, ever. And yet, I myself have heard both, even as recently as this past year, even in an urban location with plenty of Jews, in a social situation where people should have known better. In short – the word “Jew”, as it is used by certain antisemites, is – quite unambiguously – a slur. Not a dead slur, not a former slur – and active, living slur that most Jews will at some point in their life encounter in a context where the term is being used to denigrate them and their religion. 

Now here’s the thing, though: I’m a Jew. I call myself a Jew. I prefer that all non-Jews call me a Jew – so do most Jews I know. “Jew” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Judaism, the same way that “Muslim” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Islam, and “Christian” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Christianity. 

In fact, almost all of the terms that non-Jews use to avoid saying “Jew” (eg. “a member of the Jewish persuasion”, “a follower of the Jewish faith”, “coming from a Jewish family”, “identifying as part of the Jewish religion”, etc) are deeply offensive, because these terms imply to us that the speaker sees the term “Jew” (and by extension, what that term stands for) as a dirty word.

“BUT WAIT” – I hear you say – “didn’t you just say that Jew is used as a slur?!?”

Yes. Yes, I did. And also, it is fundamentally offensive not to call us that, because it is our name and our identity.

Let me back up a little bit, and bring you into the world of one of those 2000s PSAs about not using “that’s so gay”. Think of some word that is your identity – something which you consider to be a fundamental and intrinsic part of yourself. It could be “female” or “male”, or “Black” or “white”, “tall” or “short”, “Atheist” or “Mormon” or “Evangelical” – you name it.

Now imagine that people started using that term as a slur.

“What a female thing to do!” they might say. “That teacher doesn’t know anything, he’s so female!”

Or maybe, “Yikes, look at that idiot who’s driving like an atheist. It’s so embarrassing!”

Or perhaps, “Oh gross, that music is so Black, turn it off!”

Now, what would you say if the same groups of people who had been saying those things for years turned around and avoided using those words to describe anything other than an insult?

“Oh, so I see you’re a member of the female persuasion!”

“Is he… a follower of the atheist beliefs? Like does he identify as part of the community of atheist-aligned individuals?”

“So, as a Black-ish identified person yourself – excuse me, as a person who comes from a Black-ish family…”

Here’s the fundamental problem with treating all words that are used as slurs the same, without any regard for how they are used and how they developed – not all slurs are the same.

No one, and I mean no one (except maybe for a small handful of angsty teens who are deliberately making a point of being edgy) self-identifies as a kike. In contrast, essentially all Jews self-identify as Jews. And when non-Jews get weird about that identity on the grounds that “Jew is used as a slur”, despite the fact that it is the name that the Jewish community as a whole resoundingly identifies with, what they are basically saying is that they think that the slur usage is more important than the Jewish community self-identification usage. They are saying, in essence, “we think that your name should be a slur.” 

Now, at the top I said that the word “Jew” and the word “queer” had some significant similarities in terms of their usage, and I think that’s pretty apparent if you look at what people in those communities are saying about those terms. When American Jews were being actively threatened by neo-Nazis in the 70s, the slogan of choice was “For every Jew a .22!″. When the American Queer community was marching in the 90s in protest of systemic anti-queer violence, the slogan of choice was “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” Clearly, these are terms that are used by the communities themselves, in reference to themselves. Clearly, these terms are more than simply slurs.

But while there are useful similarities between how the terms “Jew” and “Queer” are used by bigots and by their own communities, I’d also like to point out that there is pretty substantial and important difference:

Unlike for “queer”, there is no organized group of Jewish antisemites who are using the catchphrase “Jew is a slur!” in order to selectively silence and disenfranchise Jews who are part of minority groups within Judaism. 

This is the real rub with the term queer – no one was campaigning about it being a slur until less than a decade ago. No one was saying that you needed to warn for the word queer when queer people were establishing the academic discipline of queer studies. No one was ‘think of the children”-ing the umbrella term when queer activists were literally marching for their lives. Go back to even 2010 and the term “q slur” would have been basically unparseable – if I saw someone tag something “q slur”, like most queer people I would have wracked my brains trying to figure out what slur even started with q, and if I learned that it was supposed to be “queer”, my default assumption would be that the post was made by a well-meaning but extremely clueless straight person.

I literally remember this shift – and I remember who started it. Exclusionists didn’t like the fact that queer was an umbrella term. Terfs (or radfems as they like to be called now) didn’t like that queer history included trans history; biphobes and aphobes didn’t like that the queer community was also a community to bisexuals and asexuals. And so what could they possibly say, to drive people away from the term that was protecting the sorts of queer people that they wanted to exclude?

Well, naturally, they turned to “queer is a slur.”

And here’s the thing – queer is a slur, just like Jew is a slur, and no one is denying that. And that fact makes “queer is a slur so don’t use it” a very convincing argument on the surface: 1) queer is still often used as a slur, and 2) you shouldn’t ever use slurs without carefully tagging and warning people about them (and better yet, you should never use them at all), and so therefore 3) you need to tag for “the q slur” and you need to warn people not to call the community “the queer community” or it’s members “queer people” or its study “queer studies” – because it’s a slur!

But the crucial step that’s missing here is exactly the same one above, for the word “Jew” – and that step is that not all slurs are the same. When a term is both used as a slur and used as a self-identity term, then favoring the slur meaning instead of the identity meaning is picking the side of the slur-users over the disadvantaged group! 

If you say or tag “q slur” you are sending the message, whether you realize it or not, that people who use “queer” as a slur are more right about its meaning than those who use it as their identity. Tagging for “queer” is one thing. People can filter for “queer” if it triggers them, just like people can filter for anything else. Not everyone has to personally use the term queer, or like the term queer. But there is no circumstance where the term “q slur” does not indicate that you think queer is more of a slur than of an accurate description of a community.

If I, as a Jew, ever came across a post where someone had warned for innocent, positive, non-antisemitic content relating to Judaism with the tag “J slur”, I would be incensed. So would any Jew. The act of tagging a post “J slur” is in and of itself antisemitic and offensive.

Queer people are allowed to feel the same about “q slur”. It is not a neutral warning term – it is an attack on our identity.

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a-lot-of-ace

This is one of the most well written posts about the evolution of “queer” I have ever seen. Please take the time to read this. Yes it is long but it is more than worth the 5 minutes!

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Reblogged

I need an edit of an image. Specifically, the screen cap of partisan from leverage, in that episode, where he talks about new tradition, no stabbing Wednesdays. Except that the note needs to be blocked out so that it says stabbing Wednesdays. And then I want to put it in my queue to poston March 15 of 2028. Which is a Wednesday.

You have choices!

Thaaaaaaaaaaank

Hey if you own a business I need you to repeat after me:

  • I will not let my web developer manage my domain registration.
  • My domains are my responsibility and they cannot be handed to a contractor.
  • If I do not control my domains, I do not control my website.
  • If my domain is paid for on somebody else's credit card, it isn't really mine.
  • I will read every contract carefully and abide by its terms.
  • If the terms of a contract are not agreeable to me, I will amend them until the contractor and I both agree to and are aware of the terms.
  • I will pay my contractors in a timely fashion.
  • I will not burn bridges with my contractors.
  • I will pay for domain registration myself, and will never grant anyone else complete control over my domain.
  • I will not let my web developer manage my domain registration.

webdev account perfec t size to put domain in to store! inside very ssafe and secure domain be safe put domain in webdev account. put domain in webdev account. no problems ever in webdev account because no mfa for quick access make domain changes fast with no review. awebdev godaddy yes a place for domain put domain in webdev account can trust webdev for giveing good love to domain. friend webdev

Shit man, this wizard war is fucked. I just saw a guy clap his hands together and say "the ten hells" or some similar shit, and every one around him turned inside out, had their tibia explode and then disappeared. The camera didn't even go onto him, that's how common shit like this is. My ass is casting frostbite and level 2 poison. I think I just heard "power word:scrunch" two groups over. I gotta get the fuck outta here.

“Rayban charity glasses event” is a scam don’t click any link in a post that says that.

Old tumblr users remember this scam back when it first went out.

Also no, this isn’t a joke. This phishing scam is 100% running its course again so watch out for your mutuals long abandoned accounts suddenly posting it. Please make everyone aware of it since most users here are newbies who have not seen it before!

I saw this pop-up in my notifications like two days ago, the Ray-Ban‘s thing. Please be aware everyone that the Ray-Ban’s thing is that you get tagged in somebody’s post about a great Rayban deal and it encourage you to click a link. It’s just a tag zoo of a whole bunch of people. Do not click the link. Do not read Blog the post. It is a kindness to reach out to the person whose blog it was that tagged you, so that they know they need to update their password and delete some shitty spam posts.

As I write this, it is the evening of 29 March, 2025

I need an edit of an image. Specifically, the screen cap of partisan from leverage, in that episode, where he talks about new tradition, no stabbing Wednesdays. Except that the note needs to be blocked out so that it says stabbing Wednesdays. And then I want to put it in my queue to poston March 15 of 2028. Which is a Wednesday.

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