Vote with your heart not with your pussy

Prince sleeps a lot

Blitz know's when Stolas is asleep, his boy's out for the count.

And knows that he can use that to give Stolas affection.

He fusses Stolas feathers, strokes his face, kisses he's cheak

And... That Stolas will stay asleep while Blitz grabs every horse plushie, from the around the flat, to snuggle around Stolas. Just incase he got lonely.

All this requires a lot of practice to know just how much you can get away with, without waking up your partner.

I think this is what that bit in Look My Way is about.

A half remembered stoke, as he dropped off to sleep. Making Stolas not sure if he dreamt of not.

Blitz has definitely spent full moons messing with a zonked out Stolas. Seeing just how much cuddly shit he could get away with.

i think when it comes to knowledge gaps (especially on tumblr) its easy to get insecure about not knowing everything. but the real secret is that you can get away with not knowing everything if you just dont insert yourself into conversations you dont understand with blind confidence. the internet also gives you the privilege of 1) googling/wikipediaing shit before you say it, and 2) not volunteering how little you know. you dont actually have to enter the conversation just to say how little you know. part of the stereotype of dipshit stupid american on here is that americans will say full chestedly that they dont know which continent tchad is in and then go out of their way to justify it with their lack of education. when no one asked them to say either thing. and even if someone did ask, you are never under any obligation to actually answer.

nothing funnier to me than when AI does math wrong. like I get why it happens, it's a language model that's treating the numbers you feed it as words rather than integers and then giving you an answer based on how those words typically appear in a block of text instead of actually performing a calculation. but the one thing computers are genuinely incredible at. you fucked up a perfectly good calculator is what you did, look at it it's got hallucinations

mentioned to my barber that I’m moving to Georgia and looking forward to the green anoles that sometimes bask on the porch. she said “ew”. logically I know that every human is a vast and unknowable sea of experiences I do not share. but how can someone see a harmless little green lizard outside and think “ew”? a phobia I could at least understand. but ew??? ew??? are you from another fucking planet that doesn’t have organic life on it???

AO3 👏 TAGS 👏 ARE 👏 NOT 👏 SPOILERS 👏

i’m so tired of authors not tagging correctly because they don’t want to “spoil the fic”

correctly tagging your fic allows readers who DON’T want to read things like major character death, gore, mpreg or whatever may be their squick to filter your fic out from the main ship/fandom tag. not including the correct tags on your fic is harmful to readers and i’m tired of pretending it’s not.

“don’t like don’t read” great! i won’t! tag your fic correctly next time ffs

if you fear a tag will ruin the plot or reveal a twist write that in the notes at the beginning and a detailed warning in the end notes!

Ao3's tag system is a great tool that helps sensitive readers take more educated risks, but if we're jumping all the way to 'if you don't tag my squick then you are HARMING me' then we've gone waaay too far.

(If OP had just been talking about failing to follow Ao3's rules around the major warnings that would be one thing, but they also threw in 'mpreg or whatever may be their squick' so now it's rant time.)

I do think warning your readers about major common squicks outside the archive warnings is a great impulse! I do it myself! And yet it's also true that literally anything can be a squick or trigger. A potential trigger may seem obvious to you while being totally unnoticeable to the author, and vice versa. Maybe you remembered to tag mpreg, but did you tag for needles? Vomiting? Menstruation? Blood? Doctor's offices? Drug use (because the character takes tylenol one time)? Car crashes? Underage drinking (that isn't considered underage in your country of residence or the time period in which your story is set)? Fatphobia? Character skipping meals? Racial slurs (against Vulcans)? Child endangerment? These are all things that might be reasonably expected to squick or trigger readers because they bring to mind real-world awfulness. I see all of these used as content tags sometimes, but waaaaay less than they 'should' be if authors were truly obligated to protect us from being squicked. And that's not even getting into common narrative or sexual squicks that might be a huge deal to some (unprotected sex, unlubed anal sex, rimming, ass to mouth, breeding kink, daddy kink, undernegotiated D/S, etc) but are so entirely within the realm of normal for others it would never occur to them to tag.

I certainly encourage authors to use tags to help readers find what they're looking for and avoid what they don't want, but enthusiasm for Ao3's tagging system can go too far, wherein readers with specific squicks or triggers begin to hold authors more accountable than they hold themselves. Tagging literally everything is impossible, and there is no fandom consensus on what has to be tagged other than the standard archive warnings.

Creating a new fandom consensus on what MUST be tagged beyond the existing consensus of rape, under-18 sex, graphic violence, and major character death would be incredibly fraught. Standardizing a warning is a powerful normative act, one that can easily inflate existing personal feelings into harsher moral judgments. "We all agree this topic is so upsetting it MUST be warned for" is one step down from declaring a topic entirely taboo. And that has consequences. Victims of rape and child abuse talk about how psychologically damaging it can be to have to cordon off a major part of your own life experiences lest they discomfort others; it can easily feel like you yourself are being declared a blight rather than the harm that was done to you.

Awareness of this impact is why I confess I do find it concerning that the untagged sqicks people get most vocal about tend to involve deviation from sex and gender norms. I understand that pregnancy is a horrifying threat to many fanfic readers and that a lot of us have deep discomfort with our sexual traits, which can naturally lead to us only being able to enjoy a narrower slice of available fictional content, but I never see anybody up in arms about undeniably negative shit like untagged car crashes the way I see some people up in arms about having to occasionally encounter neutral things like untagged mpreg or omegaverse or gender-atypical genitalia.

This is always especially unnerving to me when the offending topic is something that is both inherently morally neutral and entirely possible to encounter among real-life strangers in a positive context. Sure, getting hit with a wave of gender dysphoria when you're trying to read erotica is a bad time, and it's entirely logical to want to select your erotica according to your own genital preferences, but the level of moral outrage people occasionally exhibit when they encounter unexpected genital configurations in erotic fanfic tends to be, uh, pretty unmistakably hostile towards trans bodies, even when it's coming from trans people. Like, okay, say mpreg is a trigger for you because you associate it with threats of corrective rape and you don't want to read about it in your escapist fanfic—fair enough. Do you also ask real pregnant trans men in real life to put content warnings on their happy selfies of themselves just existing? Do you get why that would be fucked up? Do you get how it would be extra fucked up to make that request mandatory at an institutional level? Especially if cis pregnancy didn't require any warnings?

Then there's the structural question.

Ao3 content tags were designed to be used positively—the 'exclude' feature did not exist at launch—and as such there was an implied expectation that if you tagged your story as x, you were putting the tag there for people who might want to filter FOR stories with x. That meant a very brief mention of x occurring offscreen wouldn't merit an x tag; nobody came to a fic tagged Arranged Marriage expecting to hear about the main character's cousin having an arranged marriage.

The recent push to use content tags as warnings has led to aggressive overtagging of minor mentions of x, making the x tag less and less useful as a positive filter. This is somewhat mitigated by people using 'minor x' or 'x mention' instead of clogging the 'x' tag (shoutout to people putting background ships in the content tags instead of the ship tags!) which I appreciate. However, this points to a fundamental tension in the practical use of Ao3 tags now that we do have the 'exclude' feature.

If the point is to help readers avoid things, authors will tag very differently than if the point is to help readers find things they might like. And the original structural design of content tags was to help readers find things they might like. Ao3 is firstly for authors to archive their fics and secondarily to help readers find those fics. Only thirdly is it optimized to help readers NOT find fics.

Talking like the 'correct' use of Ao3 tags is to optimize exclusion means you've got your understanding of Ao3 tags backwards.

Authors can be expected to tag the stuff they personally find most relevant about their fic, in much the same way a book in the library has a few major keywords attached. More granular content warnings are a bonus. If you as a reader are highly sensitive to encountering a type of content that falls outside of the major archive warnings, you have to take responsibility for that yourself; it will never be reasonable to 100% conclude that a given fic lacks your squick just because your squick isn't tagged. Unless somebody is blatantly lying about archive warnings or actively mis-tagging, they are not tagging their fic 'incorrectly.'

It's great to encourage people to tag more comprehensively! Explaining why certain tags are of interest to readers would be a good start, or perhaps explaining how to maximize the use of filterable tags that work as both positive and negative simultaneously. But OP's post is neither helpful nor accurate.

tags by cerusee: #I largely tend to use the additional tags as a way to try to convey both what the story is about and how it will be about it #when I’m actually looking for fics to read I tend to focus on the tags as much as the summary #bc they will often tell me things the author wouldn’t think to put in the summary #(writing summaries is so hard! tags are much more mental freeform) #anyway as someone who largely had a hard time finding brand new fics and authors just by clicking on a fandom tag #no matter what kind of filtering I do #I am personally of the opinion that whatever their other virtues #tags simply cannot replace the superior but obviously more labor intensive #practice of creating rec lists #having a trusted reccer is a much much much more reliable way #of getting the kind of content you really want and also hopefully #get some of those personalized warnings about personal squicks and triggers that are not at all fandom consensus #but that would require building up fandom communities #and not treating AO3/authors like a fic Pez dispenser#much too difficult. easier to bitch about the world not conforming to your expectations

Personally, I always thought of AO3 as an ARCHIVE. As a professional archivists, I do not catalog based on potential triggers within my collections. I catalog using terms that make it easier for researchers to find the topics and information they are looking for. When you use AO3, are you looking for stories with topics which might interest you or are you looking to avoid discomfort?

Two animals people need to shut the fuck up about and be normal are pandas and dolphins

Respectfully, no.

Pandas are only alive because they're cute.

Dolphins are sex criminals and drug fiends.

No. Pandas are animals that evolved to fit a particular biome. The fact that they don't reproduce well in captivity isn't a mark against them, it's a mark against captivity. They, like almost any animal, are threatened by fragmented habitat and are luckily cute enough to get the funding necessary to conserve them. If not for similar conservation efforts all kinds of animals of varying degrees of cuteness would be dead as well. Nobody is calling for the abandonment of the black footed ferret project because ferrets are cute and somehow that makes them less-than in the eyes of slack jawed edgy douchebro comedians.

Dolphins are mammals and enjoy things that mammals commonly enjoy, such as intoxicants, and if you're going to pretend to be shocked and disgusted by a dolphin getting high you'll also have to throw away reindeer and every other animal that enjoys fermented juices including fruit flies. Dolphins are perceived by humans as being more intelligent and therefore more culpable to "sins" than other animals but humans can't even agree on what's immoral let alone expecting a non human animal to magically ascribe to our same biases for no reason and assign the animal negative traits when it fails to meet that asinine expectation.

The sooner you stop trying to shoehorn in some fake idea of an animal being more or less deserving of its existence the easier it will be to get through to people.

Which I should just go ahead and say right now, the OP was inspired by an article about a woman who was injured in a dolphin petting pen on vacation and the comments were full of people blaming THE DOLPHIN because "theyre nasty violent rapists" and not the humans, who captured it, forced it into a pen, and climbed and petted all over it knowing full well it was a large wild predator that had no business being swarmed by untrained fucking idiots.

It may have been haha funny shocking animal fact at first but now it's ruined because too many people started buying that shit for real and now we have people who no longer want to preserve the sea otter because it doesn't know what consent is.

don’t quote me on this but i’m starting to think that having a smug ironic detachment from all aspects of human experience might not be totally healthy

sometimes a theme recurs in your work without your permission. and sometimes it reaches a threshold where you're like. well now i think this is saying something about me against my will. don't know what though

"male loneliness epidemic" is misleading because it implies that men are suffering because they can't get girls when I feel like the actual problem is that pretty much any online content that's aimed specifically at men conceptualizes the masculine ideal as what I call the Buff Scammer. there are only two things in this world that matter, says the Buff Scammer: being jacked and making money. how you get to either of those things doesn't matter, you just need to be as rich and as buff as possible or you have failed as a man. Get into drop shipping. Eat nothing but raw meat. Rugpull a memecoin. Remove seasonings from your diet. Sell an online course. Go to the gym daily. Starve yourself so your body will achieve ketosis and start burning fat. Attend a seminar on real estate investing. Work 80 hours a week. Take steroids but don't let anyone know about that part. Flip a YouTube channel after 10xing the subs. Sell AI art on Etsy and AI audiobooks on Amazon. What's that? You're trying to do this to get girls? Why would you care about women? Women are all stupid whores who don't help you get richer or buffer. The only people you should be paying attention to are other rich, buff men. If you do hang out with women you should be pimping them out on Chaturbate so you can at least get an ROI off your time spent not thinking about men. Male friends? You don't have time for friends. You should be hustling and grinding 24/7 365. And if you absolutely do need to spend time around other men you should only be spending time with other buff scammers so you can collaborate on entrepreneurial ventures. Like Jesus Christ even writing this is exhausting I feel like trying to be this dude would be fucking miserable like not only did you turn yourself into a friendless, materialist, misogynistic asshole who can only conceptualize the world in terms of value extracted but you're NOT EVEN HAVING FUN DOING IT!!!!!!

At some point in my transition, the "hate yourself, get an eating disorder, buy product" messaging I get switched from woman flavor to man flavor, and omfg. What the hell is this shit!

The "woman" version would often disguise itself as self care. There's this facade of softness and gentleness. ("indulge yourself: buy skincare! do what's right for YOU: starve yourself and smile emptily at zucchini noodles! this is empowering. your body is a temple, divine feminine chakra mother!!!") In the man version, no such thing. Self compassion is not allowed. You've got to brutally grind yourself into the shape of a Real Man or die trying, but you don't get to *enjoy* being the Real Man because comfort is for girrrrrrlllssss.

My dangerous trans gender ideology is that being a man should be enjoyable. If there's nothing fun about it, change your approach or stop being a man.

Shakespearean Seinfeld episode like:

"He thoued me, Jerry."

"He thoued you?"

"He thoued me!"

Weird they would go to Jerry about that and he would use the formal you:

"He thoued me, Jerry?"

"Thoust got thoued?"

"Thoued!"

"Wow."

I think Jerry would employ the formal address in response to George's complaint in this specific circumstance purely to be passive aggressive.

#george would of course completely fail to pick up on it

comic book trend that honestly irks the fuck out of me is when an existing character comes out as gay and they invent a new character to be their partner. like theres nothing wrong with it per se its just that the new boyfriend/girlfriend character is always jarringly bland and uninteresting, especially when compared to the latent homosexual potential that definitely already existed in the story. like there’s something so deeply unsatisfying about introducing a new side character as a girlfriend for karma in new mutants 2019 when she’d been having dramatic hand-holding adventures with dani the whole time. it implies such a definite hesitancy to ever make characters gay For Each Other, and the result of that hesitancy is that you don’t get any of the long-term slow-burn relationships that heterosexual characters get (like between batman and catwoman or whatever). instead you get New Relatable Millennial Queer Partner that you have to fight tooth and nail to give a fuck about. nobody’s doing it like rictor and shatterstar anymore nobody’s doing coming out reveals that hit like that

a quick sketch of a lil concept I had in mind for a while. If he walked in like this, the case would be won 💯

i always click the "track package" button as soon as i get the email. "oh boy i wonder where my package is!" warehouse.

"UM OP DON'T YOU REALIZE THAT THIS INNOCUOUS VIDEO/IMAGE/POST IS ACTUALLY FETISH CONTENT"

everyone is correct in that i missed a crucial option 3. i'm into that actually

4. Please consider some internal exploration of why you "recognized" this as fetish content.

Devils sacrament?!

5. All content on the internet is fetish content if you believe in yourself.

BEHOLD!

Fetish content!

I do think there's a thing we need to address about how often Trump voters / conservatives are treated as something out in the "real world" that people are avoiding, and liberals / leftists are framed as Overly Online. It's a thing a lot of people further somewhat unconsciously in a lot of left-wing political Internet spaces.

First off, this could not be less true right now. The current right wing quite literally got this way by being way too online! Even putting aside the infinite discussions about how Gamergate and 4chan created the modern alt-right. JD Vance and Elon Musk are way more out of touch with how niche their opinions actually are than your average campus activist. I mean, there literally are more people in the U.S. who agree with campus protesters about Gaza, massive numbers more, than agree with many of the things that Vance and Musk believe. And those guys are unaware of how weird they are because they spend all their time in Internet echo chambers, in Musk's case one he literally built to be that. The average Tumblr user is far more likely to be exposed regularly to political views they strongly disagree with than these people are when they log on. Second, I've talked about how political opinions are not evenly spread around the country. It is not that the U.S. is 50/50 liberals/conservatives everywhere you go. A lot of Democratic voters are concentrated in places full of other Democrats. If I did want to seek out Trump supporters to talk to, I am significantly more likely to find them online than I am by leaving my house in Baltimore. Third, and perhaps most concerning - I can't be the only one who sees in this an echo of "right-wing America is the Real America and the liberal areas are full of elites who are out of touch!" in this rhetoric, right? Again, I don't think people are doing it intentionally. It's an example of how deeply right-wing political narratives have seeded into people's brains that this comes up so much on left-leaning corners of the Internet.

But we must, must strenuously reject rhetoric suggesting that conservatism is more authentic, salt-of-the-earth than either liberalism or leftism. Starting with that it's deeply racist, for reasons I hope I don't have to explain. Second, because it's just not true. Third, it distracts from how left-wing policies help everyone, and conservatives can only maintain their power by lying through a massive propaganda network of TV and Internet.

i love characters who do the “i worship the myth i make of you” and in turn dehumanize and get wrong the object of their devotion and love. yes project a thing that does not exist onto a pedestal and kneel at it like it is your altar. this will surely not blow up in both of your faces eventually