"i was a transtrender" no you werent. you were just questioning your identity and then you decided that wasn't for you. that's a fucking healthy thing to do. fuck off lmao

Questioning is:

-healthy

-common

-normal

Questioning isn't:

-an excuse to be transphobic towards often young individuals

I once thought I was asexual and it turned out I actually wasn’t ready to have sex before I had transitioned to a point where I was more comfortable with my body. 

And in that time, the asexual community welcomed me, supported me, helped me feel good about who I was, protected me from the harm I would have done to myself if I had pushed myself to have sex. That made a huge difference.

If I see an opportunity to support asexual organizations, I do so not just because it’s good but also because they were there for me in a difficult part of my life without judgement. I owe them for that.

If you at one point identified as transgender or questioned your gender identity, maybe you too sought a home in the wrong place because you were struggling with something else. And it is very likely that the people in that home, the transgender community, believed you and welcomed you and listened to you.

And then when it turns out that you were searching for the wrong thing, you don’t just leave that community behind but you turn around and shit on them? Shame on you. What a shitty thing to do.

if something's a phase, it's a phase. Doesn't mean that it's bad or wrong. It was just only right for a while.

i think a lot of liberals need to confront the fact that they don’t actually believe everyone should have basic human rights. a homeless person could call me every slur under the sun and i would still want them to have housing, food, etc. the belief that everyone is entitled to basic human rights should not hinge on whether you “like” someone or not. at that point the entire ideology crumbles.

The grim reaper was initially illustrated as doing a mundane, regular job that everyone has seen done - a reaper swings his scythe and the hay falls, just as easy as people fall as death swings. Now many people who have never been to a farm only know the scythe as the weapon of Death personified, and farmers in most places of the world don't even use them anymore.

Imagine Death personified as someone doing a modern regular, mundane job. Imagine thinking "hoo boy, this is it for me. The Grim Bin Man is coming to collect, hauling my sorry soul into the trash compactor of his great eternal garbage truck."

Death is picking me up with his little grabber and stuffing me in his grim trash bag

a modern grim reaper is like ... a garbageman.

pacific rim fucks severely for a lot of reasons but my favorite is that it opens with "the lizard aliens are unionizing so we built robots running on the power of love to fight them you got all that right" and before you have time to really process that concept bam gunshot body on the floor and the movie goes "now consider the vast power of grief in this setup" it never really stops considering

Pacific Rim is about choosing hope.

The note inside a bullet.

B-17 bomber is riddled with German anti-aircraft fire but miraculously survives. Later they discover the explosive shells were all inert; sabotaged by Nazi slaves working in armament factories.

Inside one empty shell is a written note: it's all we can do for you now.

The most important part of all this is that these small acts of bravery and noncompliance cannot be known as long as the enemy still stands, and might never be known. Just because it doesn’t seem like anyone is doing anything doesn’t mean it’s true. The best malicious compliance or subtle sabotage is the one that’s never detected, but makes ravages nonetheless.

A critical part of any resistance is

Do not post your crimes

Do not brag. Do not look for brownie points. Do not publicly recruit. Keep your mouth shut.

i want a restraining order on everyone who doesn’t wear deodorant 

Deodorant is nasty. What do y'all think people smelled like up until 70 years ago??

Bad.

1. Perfume.

2. Soap. Yeah, they had soap from a pretty early point. Sometimes it was scented and sometimes it just smelled like lye, but there you go. Ditto scented powders, lotions, hair products, cosmetics, etc.

3. Whatever their clothes smelled like. Not always body odor. Linen was worn next to the skin with masculine and feminine clothing alike for a LOT of western history, to wick up sweat. I’ve worn a linen chemise under a long-sleeved Edwardian summer dress in Manhattan in August, and even after like six hours, my dress smelled faintly of the lavender it was stored with. My chemise reeked when I got undressed later, but none of the smell had escaped. No joke. Shit really works.

4. Occupational smells. A baker might smell of bread and faintly of sweat, a blacksmith of sweat and iron, a medieval priest of incense, a Victorian teacher of chalk, etc.

5. Yes, sometimes bad. But not everyone by a long shot, and not all the time.

Also they definitely didn’t want to smell bad, and used all resources available to them to avoid it. So, barring any allergies, use some damn deodorant.

They literally had deodorant in medieval Europe.

Yeah, people did a lot of stuff to avoid smelling bad.

They used a lot of perfume and other products on their hair and body, and scented their clothes, and used natural products with scent-reducing properties (like sandalwood).

And they bathed, too! It's not like people were unwashed and filthy for most of history.

This Twitter thread really spoke to me. I wanted to share it with anyone who hasn’t seen it. 

official linguistics post

see also different versions of the language. Think of the differences between American English and UK English.

i fucking can’t stand antitheists like genuinely from the bottom of my heart shut up about hating all religion so much that you can’t help being a bigot about it

“you’re not saying being against judaism is antisemitic right?” shut the fuck up you little fucking bigot like you just can’t fucking help yourself can you

it might surprise you i know but being against religion in general doesn’t make you a better or smarter or kinder human being it just makes you a dick who can’t respect that people are allowed to have religion and deserve to observe their religious beliefs without you being a little baby about it

and you can be nonreligious or not big on organized religions without being an asshole about it. But there are so many anti-religious people who are assholes about it.

Do not obey in advance.

Keep hating It's working

Okay but reblogging specifically for "Tesla in Distressla" because whoever came up with that tagine deserves a moment of recognition.

Absolutely. Tesla has done a PR 180, is hemorrhaging sales, and people are ripping Elon Musk a new one regularly. It's a sign.

Concept: cursed blade rehabilitation center. Destroying a sentient weapon is expensive and highly unethical, so adventurers bring them to the center where highly trained staff can care for them and eventually find them forever homes. It turns out most cursed weapons are products of trauma and are not strictly evil themselves. Some blades turn out to be fiercely protective companions. Others don't even want to be weapons at all, finding joy in simple work like blacksmithing or farming. Most blades just need to be loved.

A pack of bandits descend upon a seemingly undefended town. But the blacksmith's hammer, the farmer's scythe, the woodsman's axe, they have not forgotten what they once were, and they *will* defend the town that they have come to love.

This sweet girl has been with us for seven seasons. She was forged in the heart of a volcano and would be ideal for anyone with a preexisting fire affinity (she's a cuddler and is guaranteed to keep you warm in winter). She still loves burning, but it turns out you can only reduce the world to ash once. She would be perfectly suited for forest management that regularly requires controlled burns.

This weary old soul has grown tired of bloodshed and would much rather spend his days as an ominous decoration in a tavern or common room, a perfect fit for an adventurer looking to leave their dungeon crawling days behind. He likes peoplewatching with his single glowing eye, preferably from high, prominent locations with views of entrances and exits.

Dark king Grütmore’s edge of annihilation consumed 10,000 souls in the first era, and as it turns out, statistically a lot of those souls heard stories that never got written down. It works in a library now.

The throngler, however, is just irrevocably fucked up. We put it in a stone in a forest and hoped nobody ever finds it

there's an ice-affinity blade like in PTerry's Thief of Time book, except that it's being used as a cooling unit? Possibly to make a storage room in the kitchen of a fancy restaurant into a walk-in refrigerator, or as an a/c in a building.

A quick map I made last year for the Month of Maps to highlight the National Parks of Canada. They make up 3.4% of Canada's area, and range wildly in size from Signal Hill or Phillip's Garden focusing on specific archaeological sites to the parks of Nunavut covering entire landscapes. They are often beautiful and deeply meaningful for either cultural or biological reasons, or even just their outstanding natural beauty.

"you're just racist"

people don't care if it's a white person who overstays their temp/student visa. they don't care if a white person marries a random person to get greencard. and so on, and so on.

“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:

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.

banning content is about control.

Think about why certain books or movies or school subjects are subject to censorship. Censors - whether it's parents, school boards, religious bodies, governments, and more - want to control what you know, how you think, what information you can access, and what you can learn.

These censoring bodies will use any excuse to censor books. Antiracist books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird get taken off shelves for being "racist," and books that teach kids how to notice, avoid, and report child abuse are removed for sex. It's nuts.

"Aro/Ace person gets given a love potion" story but instead of them being immune or whatever, it DOES work, and they realize IMMEDIATELY that they've been fed a love potion because this feeling is so wrong and foreign but everyone keeps laughing off the idea of it being a love potion because "they were probably just a late bloomer" or "no, you just finally found the right person!" and it's just a horror story about how no one believes them even though they know, they KNOW this isn't right and they can't stand it.

this is so neat to play with! Because a love potion is a drug, and like a lot of drugs, once it's in your system it just starts to work!

So an aro/ace person would be affected, but would have a higher chance of going "holy shit, wtf" because it's outside of their wheelhouse.

we've all seen trans boy dipper pines but i think more people should consider trans girl mabel. that girl has the most gender euphoria of all time shes over the moon to get to do preteen girl things like having sleepovers with her besties and crushing on boys and covering herself in glitter. also i think it makes dippers manliness crisises 3x funnier if mabel already had a gender revelation years ago and is just chilling. see my vision.

Honestly, my fave idea is that they're both trans. They just swapped identities at some point.

right at the start of the summer. their parents have no idea

they stopped somewhere on their way over and swapped outfits. Then later they swap out stuff from their suitcases.

Thank you Derek, menswear guide, for reminding me why paying more to be free advertising for brands is dumb.

I don't mind paying for brand when the brand offers superior quality. You're getting what you pay for. But I'll be damned if I'll pay extra just for a name.