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i have GOT to get weirder

@sandersgrey

Brazilian. Aroace. My name is Alex. I'm a young adult. Nonbinary, he/him and sir/sirs pronouns. In a QPR with jynxlovesluck. My icon was drawn by me. Header by @jesse-is-spiralling. (all if my posts are ok to reblog unless i say otherwise. Exclusionists, nazis and TERFs dni). I have no tag for my queue, so seeing me posting doesn't necessarily mean I'm online. Please do not tag me in chain posts or send me those in asks. Welcome to my blog! Hope you enjoy it.
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Yo. DNI if you're an exclusionist, a MAP, a Trump supporter, a zionist, etc etc. You may be allowed to lurk (we all start learning somewhere) but don't fucking touch anything.

My url is a reference to a character from a book series called League and Legends, by E.Jade Lomax. Her website has the ebooks available for free. Check it out if you enjoy fantasy, found family, and trope subversion.

She also has a very interesting multiple choice game, for anyone out there who enjoys time loops and the ability to be queer in games.

Fair warning, I have a tendency to jump from interest to interest.

Feel free to send me asks or tag me in posts, but keep in mind I'm fairly low energy and it might take me a bit to get to answer. I'm not ignoring you, I'm just depressed.

I tag for r*pe, s*icide mention, and violence against minorities, as well as posts with images that don't have descriptions.

My personal tag is "alex won't shut up" and my art tag is "alex's arty." Feel free to rummage around. I don't mind notif spams.

Please do let me know if I mess up when it comes to social issues.

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Anonymous asked:

hey Elvis is the glass half full or half empty to you?

Woah mama it depends on whether you're filling or emptying

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Endless optimism is a foolish way to look at the world, unable to see the strife and suffering. Endless pessimism will never make anyone happy, especially not you. You need to take the good and the bad, the dark and the light, the full and the empty. Hummina hummina hummina

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silvaurum

if the idea of 'fat people are hot' makes you so agonizingly uncomfortable that you have to pop up with 'fetishization' or 'glorifying' or 'not everyone--' please consider that your discomfort with my fat body being hot is a You Problem and i am not interested

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think the great thing about house md is that the characters really are just like that, not even exaggerated. house does not shut up about sleeping with wilson even though he claims they’re just bros, foreman complains about medical malpractice while stealing bone marrow and switching thirteens’s placebo, cameron marries a dying man and then sleeps with chase after she’s been on meth. then they sleep together again because they’re bored of watching their patients sleep patterns. chase is a blonde australian catholic, he’s one of the best surgeons in the hospital, he also kills a dictator. wilson is just some guy who’s been arrested before. he loves monster trucks, he’s had three failed marriages, he’ll give out his organs and blood at any given moment. something so wrong with them all but i love them very much.

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Like fuck me I guess, but all the "governor hotwheels" shit is telling me is that a lot of people believe that treating wheelchair users with dignity is a very conditional thing. They're very willing to use your wheelchair to hurt you, as long as you're considered bad. I fucking hate Greg Abbott, he DOES deserve to be chucked off a cliff, but all calling him "governor hotwheels" does is tell me you aren't a true disability ally.

Y'all: "Pointing out someone's wheelchair is a justifiable insult, I am very leftist"

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reblogged
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dummyemo

bf reading gideon and he just said "it would be so awesome if she wrote an alternate universe book where ortus went instead of gideon"

honestly, it'd be crazy if O̵̦̾͂́R̶̺̕̕Ţ̷͕̣̿́̔͠U̸̗̺͙͇̎̃͑̈́͜S̸̖͓̅͐́͜ was replaced by Ortus. I feel like Harrow's story would fundamentally break without O̵͙͔͒͛ͅŖ̷̺͎̬̍T̴̘̟͕̠̫̙͛̊̃̎̆̕͘̕Ų̷̺̤̫̪̭̀̆̾̉S̴̢̛̛̪̮̩͖̀̏͂̈́͝, you know? I feel like even thinking about it is gonna give me an aneurysm!

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cripplerage

As a wheelchair user I'm trying to reframe my language for "being in the way."

"I'm in the way," "I can't fit," and "I can't go there," is becoming "there's not enough space," "the walkway is too narrow," and "that place isn't accessible."

It's a small change, but to me it feels as if I'm redirecting blame from myself to the people that made these places inaccessible in the first place. I don't want people to just think that they're helping me, I want them to think that they're making up for someone else's wrongdoing. I want them to remember every time I've needed help as something someone else caused.

To the people saying this also applies to fat people - you are not derailing! This is true!!!

Yes! Redirect the blame to the right place. An inaccessible space is not a personal failing, it is a poor design choice made by the company and people who designed it to be inaccessible. We are not too far, the space is too small and it (and the people who made it) is at fault.

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klapollo

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

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draconym

90s movies: Psychopharmacology is as good as a lobotomy. If you take pills to treat your mental illness it will literally murder your imaginary friends and you will become a boring, lotus-eating conformist drone.

Me after taking my meds: drives the scenic route home to see if there are any geese on the pond and does a little dance in line at the grocery store and comes home to throw everything​ in my fridge into a stew pot because I can finally taste food again while singing songs at my birds in which I replace all the instances of "she" with "Cheese" and doing a Dolly Parton impression on the phone to my sister

"What were you like before taking the meds tho"

Two weeks ago I was posting about eating cake frosting for dinner.

I feel like it's worth mentioning that being on The Wrong Meds can indeed do the 90s movie thing to you.

Like, if you go on meds and that happens, it's not because whatever's going on with you is jut Too Severe or that you're doomed or only people with Other Illnesses get to have meds that make them feel actually good and you have to settle for "miserable but somehow so hollow I no longer care about the misery" and be grateful you're no longer actively suicidal or whatever.

If that shit happens to you, tell your fucking doctor. And if your doctor doesn't take you seriously, or acts like That's Just How Being On Meds Is, ditch them! Find a new doctor!! Because that is NOT how being on meds is supposed to work! That means the meds are not working correctly!!

Reblogging to agree and say that what was happening to me was (and to an extent still is) severe and was the result of manifold health problems and has taken the better part of a year to effectively treat. I did not expect medication to be this effective. But it is. So if you think that you are untreatable, get a second opinion.

there is a single pill i can take to immediately live a day as the best version of myself-- not a superhero, not a perfect genius, but a good dude who can read and write and do the dishes. im optimistic and coherent and can plan for the future. i write novels and walk the dog and remember to shower and brush my teeth.

if i don't take this pill i spend the day as a dirty, inept husk, a sad sack of well-meaning but futile intentions just sapient enough to be dimly aware of everything im unable to be.

this pill is incredibly difficult to obtain a steady monthly supply of because when normal people take it they have a little more fun at parties.

Counterpoint: At least if I spend the remainder of my natural life as a dirty, inept husk, a sad sack of well-meaning but futile intentions just sapient enough to be dimly aware of everything I'm unable to be... at least I'll know I'm me, not a fake version of myself created by medication. Nor do I have to worry about regressing if I run out, the repeat prescription doesn't come in time etc.

Not dissing OP's choice to take advantage of the meds, but they're not for me.

Hey, so, this is kind of the attitude that made me afraid to take meds that I really benefit from: the idea that who you are on medication is somehow "not really you."

The person I was when I was very depressed did not feel like the real me. That was a version of me that was very ill. The "real me" is the me that is able to dance at stoplights and make art and enjoy food and laugh at jokes. And for now, I need pharmaceutical help to get back there.

The assistance that medication provides doesn't make me any less The Real Me than wearing glasses or taking painkillers. Depression is a physical illness. If you try medication and you don't like the way it makes you feel, then it's not a good medication for you. But you do get to choose, and I'm glad I have the opportunity to choose to actually be myself again.

Seriously, that sack of lump-ness sitting on the floor is not the real you.

"The only cupcakes that should ever exist are homemade ones!!!1!!!!1111!" = stupidest statement ever.

If your kitchen cannot make homemade cupcakes for whatever reason, it is perfectly fine to go get storebought ones.

Because then you will have cupcakes, and cupcakes makes life happier. Even if you're not eating cupcakes with every single meal, having them to have for dessert once in a while makes life more worth living.

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Been a really long time since I've watched Daredevil but I do remember coming away from it feeling like it presented a pretty compelling internally-consistent moral justification for the vigilante thing. You're not planet-crackingly powerful, it's just that you can hear, in detail, every awful thing your neighbors are doing to each other, every night that they're doing it. You can't not know and you can't pretend not to know and when the kid tells you the next day that he just fell down the stairs you can't fall back on the provided ambiguity to absolve yourself of your responsibility to act. Semi-relatedly, you're really really good at martial arts. Start the clock

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cam1lla

“Authors should not be ALLOWED to write about–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“This book should be taken off of shelves for featuring–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Schools shouldn’t teach this book in class because–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Nobody actually likes or wants to read classics because they’re–” you are an anti-intellectual and an idiot

“I only read YA fantasy books because every classic novel or work of literary fiction is problematic and features–” you are an anti-intellectual and you are robbing yourself of the full richness of the human experience.

"you are functionally a conservative" is such a good and clarifying insult

Literally right after I saw this post, I saw another post in a discord chat for BOOK EDITORS in which an outspokenly liberal editor talked about how Nabokov should have never been published because he wrote about p*dophiles and described women's bodies in ways that made her uncomfortable. She described his writing as "objectively terrible" and said she wanted to burn his books. And other editors were bringing up classics they didn't like and talking about how they wanted to throw them in the trash. This wasn't like a light "unpopular opinion!" conversation. This was actual book editors talking about how books should be destroyed and censored.

There is something so scary and toxic in global culture right now. The revival of fascism is influencing everyone's mindset and approach to art, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.

I see far more books being censored today than when I was a kid. Librarians handed me The Catcher in the Rye, The Sexual Politics of Meat, and Animal Farm when I was literally 8-11. My mom would never have taken a book away from me. I read everything from the Tao Te Ching to the Qur'an to atheist texts under my desk at school. Teachers thought nothing of it or encouraged it. Books seemed universally acknowledged as sacrosanct to me.

Now I can't find any adults who don't hesitate or want to make exceptions when it comes to censorship. Even the most liberal social activist librarians I know go, "well except for book X..."

Functionally conservative. It's so important to have the language to express that.

Thank you for this addition!

I did a report on book banning once.

Actually, I did reports on book banning three separate times with three separate teachers, with three separate sets of parameters so I was able to write about the same topic in different ways, but this is specifically about the report I did in university. The actual specs for the report included that we were supposed to complete some kind of study or poll (this was not a science class). I put the questions out on a couple of forums I belonged to at the time and asked a few IRL friends as well. A lot of the questions were standard for this sort of thing, I think - were you ever assigned to read a banned book, did you ever read banned books on your own, did you read/were you assigned them BECAUSE they were banned or did you find out about them being banned later, what's your opinion on banning books, etc.

But there was one question I asked that ended up reshaping the entire thrust of my presentation: "Are there any books that you think SHOULD be banned, and if so, why?"

Here's the thing. Most of the forums I was posting on were fan spaces for a book series that, at the time, was one of the most banned/challenged books out there. It's a fandom that I have since entirely distanced myself from, that I one hundred percent do not recommend to anyone, that I will actively attempt to dissuade people from reading or talking about, and that I would like to not be popular anymore. I'm sure most of you reading this can guess which one I'm talking about (I won't name it or go into specifics because I don't want to trip any filters unnecessarily). But it was KNOWN that these books were banned in a lot of places. A lot of people wore the "I read banned books" badge with pride. I fully expected that the answer to that question would be a resounding "no" from the forums, and that I'd maybe get a few affirmative answers from one of the other spaces.

I was shocked. Not only did a lot of people come back with either "not exactly but I think we should keep [author] or [book] out of the hands of children" or "yes, [book]/anything by [author] should be banned because XYZPDQ", but not a single person who responded gave me the same answer. The only one I remember - keep in mind it's been almost twenty years - was that one person specifically said The Bone Collector, and for the "why do you think it should be banned" question, they only said, "No. I'm not explaining it. It's too horrible to even think about. Just believe me when I say nobody should ever be allowed to read this book."

I highlighted that last comment in my presentation, along with several other of my "favorite" official reasons for banning books - the Alabama school board that banned The Diary of Anne Frank in 1984 because it was "a real downer", the district that removed A Raisin in the Sun because it was "pornographic", the library that took Charlie and the Chocolate Factory out of circulation because it "might be hurtful to children without parents", and things of that nature - and pointed out that all of these were the same thing. This was somebody saying "I don't like this, therefore nobody should read it, and I shouldn't have to explain why." I also pointed out that if you can't give a good reason, the whole thing falls apart, and then I quoted "Smut" by Tom Lehrer:

All books can be indecent books, Though recent books are bolder, For filth, I'm glad to say, Is in the mind of the beholder. When correctly viewed, Everything is lewd. I can tell you things about Peter Pan And the Wizard of Oz - THERE'S a dirty old man...

Go back to that paragraph I mentioned earlier, about those books that I no longer recommend to anyone. Notice how I phrased that. I don't recommend them. I will tell you all the reasons why I don't think you should buy them. I will tell you all the problems with the author, with the franchise, with the writing. I wish they were out of print, I wish they were deeply unpopular, I wish nobody would ever read them again.

But I still won't advocate for banning them.

It's so easy to twist a justification. Look at what I quoted up there! A Raisin in the Sun was banned for being "pornographic". One of the websites I used as a source responded to that accusation with "Did they read the same play I did?" At the time, I thought the comment was funny. Now, twenty years later, I realize: It was a buzzword. It was a convenient label. At the time of the challenge, just saying "it's pornographic" was enough. Obviously you're not some kind of sicko who wants to hear about all the pornographic details, are you? Freak! That's pornography! And they're teaching it in schools! We should get rid of it!

A Raisin in the Sun, for anyone who didn't study it at any point or read it (or watch the movie, which was very good), is a play/movie about a black family in Chicago in the 1960s. The family matriarch has been in domestic service for years, but she's just received a very large insurance payment from her husband's death and is retiring. Wanting to give her family, especially her young grandson, a better life, she goes out and buys a house...in an otherwise exclusively white neighborhood. The head of the homeowner's association (essentially) comes to visit them and offers to pay them a substantial amount of money to not move into the neighborhood, because segregation isn't officially a thing and they can't legally stop them from moving in, but they don't want them there. There's a lot more that goes on in the play, and I highly recommend you go and read it, but the point is that there is nothing sexual or titillating in the entire thing. The closest we get is a scene where the daughter (Beneatha, a college student) is gifted a traditional African dress from her boyfriend, who's Nigerian, and he shows her how to put it on over the clothes she's already wearing, and maybe the scene where the daughter-in-law (Ruth, a laundress) accidentally reveals that, having found out she's pregnant, she's planning to have an abortion rather than bring another child into the world/have another mouth to feed.

It's not pornographic. But someone didn't want it taught in schools, so they called it that to get it banned.

It's so easy to twist labels. If you, a liberal, agree that books with X trait are okay to ban, the people who don't want books to exist will find a way to say they have X trait, and then what are you going to do, admit that you like that sort of thing? Sicko! Freak! Pervert!

You don't have to like the book, or the author, or the topic. But if you're advocating for banning them entirely, you're functionally a conservative.

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Peeta Mellark is an integral member of the four D12 victors. He is literally the sunset on the reaping! How is this not clear? I’ve never wanted to report people for bad literary analysis more and I’m only half joking. It has forced me to commit a cardinal sin: analyze in anger!

1. Him being chosen by absolute accident is the point. Not only does he represent every single other tribute who simply gets chosen because they live in a messed up country but he represents how even with some odds being in your favor (older siblings, merchant family, being white, being popular, etc.) you are still very likely to be victimized by the oppressive structure of Panem.

2. When Haymitch says, “But she was smarter than me, or luckier” - the luck is all the people around Katniss who created the circumstances for her to lead a successful revolution (her father teaching her to hunt, the arena having woods, Rue healing her with leaves, Thresh not killing her, Haymitch consistently giving her support, her mother teaching her aspects of medicine, on and on and on) and Peeta is the number one, most important part of her luck in the first book. She has someone in the games actively putting her life before his… are you kidding? There is legitimately no better luck than that.

3. Even if we take Katniss out of it, Peeta is so impactful as a victor because most of his scenes would not be cut/doctored. What’s there to edit out? Instead, the viewers get a full view of him loving a girl so selflessly, using trickery and strategy instead of violence, keeping himself alive through art, joking on literal death’s door, and sharing so much of himself with the audience it becomes harder for them not to see him as a real human boy. How rare do you think that is for the games? Haymitch and LGB are caricatures of themselves in the games, playing roles that flatten them down. Even Katniss becomes one dimensional on screen without Peeta (and Rue, of course). It is also heavily implied that he does not kill anyone during the games (in a straightforward way) and even if you count Cato or the girl from 8 or even foxface, it’s never him hunting them or seeking out a kill - again how rare do you think that is to see on screen for Games viewers?

4. I didn’t think this needed to be said but: Katniss dies without Peeta in the first games. a) she goes for the bow and dies in the bloodbath; b) she is hunted and killed by Careers; c) she is killed by game makers because there’s no love story angle to keep them from just burning her entirely; d) she dies from tracker jacker stings or Cato because Peeta doesn’t defend her or tell her to run… I could go on…

5. But even if she does win and wins alone - the victory means as much (I would argue less than) any other rebellious victor winning, certainly less than Haymitch’s win. The biggest rebellion for their games is that two of them win! This is legit the only thing that distinguishes them from any other sympathetic, kind child who would have won the games. Like if Haymitch or Finnick or Wiress winning isn’t jarring enough for the Games to end… why do you think Katniss killing Peeta and winning solo would be? It would not.

6. And finally, I cannot stress this enough: There is no peaceful end to the rebellion or the trilogy without Peeta. “Peeta’s a whiz with fires” (HG) for a reason! Collins, over and over, shows us how fire can get out of control and destroy even those who are innocent and who you love (Gale, Beete, Peeta’s family, Haymitch’s family). If everyone really burns, there’s no one to clean the ashes. The reason not everyone burns is because of people like Peeta who can coax the flames in a way that is nurturing and consistent. I mean…. “Peeta fashioned some kind of incubator” is such an obvious detail. Those goslings don’t hatch without Peeta, life does not go on in peace and joy without Peeta.

It is no coincidence that when Maysilee says Lenore Dove got the “jump on us all” (in being a rebel), she is referring to LD using orange paint to make protest art!

We must stop pushing Peeta Mellark out of the narrative! He is literally the sunset on the reaping!

THANK YOU!! I can’t stand all of this attempted peeta erasure lately when he was literally *the* factor that made the difference

Bc think about- if one tribute being rebellious was gonna be the thing that started the revolution then why couldn’t haymitch or beetee or any of the others who definitely tried in their own ways over the years?? It’s bc the love and compassion and everything that he represented and everything he brought to the table, to katniss was the actual factor that sparked the rebellion

It was never ever going to be pure anger or violence that got through to people- it was always going to be love. And peeta- whose only desire going into those games (into both games for that matter) was to save the girl that he loved even if it meant sacrificing himself. And THAT is not only the ultimate act of rebellion against the games themselves but it’s also the ingredient that someone like Plutarch never could’ve predicted that they would need for a revolution

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