welcome to the meadow

yall have to protect the gay and trans people you find cringe or whatever too I can't stress this enough no matter how annoying they are to you, you have to protect them or I'll beat your ass

I once wrote a 1500 word essay on something I'd forgotten to read in the 40 minutes before class. Including the time it took to read the thing I'd forgotten to read.

I got an A on that paper.

Writing is a skill. Skill is muscle. If you don't use a muscle, it atrophies. If you are a student and you are tempted to use genAI to cheese an assignment, I am begging you for your own sake to not do it.

This is not a moral stance about genAI (which is shit at what it's ostensibly for, and full of lies and evil, and fueled by art theft and burning rainforests, and there is no good reason to ever use it for anything; that's the moral reason for why you shouldn't use it), it is a purely pragmatic stance based on the fact that if you use it you will never learn the single most essential skill that is used in every single workplace.

You will never learn to bullshit.

And if you cannot bullshit, you will not understand when you are being fed bullshit by others.

For your own sake you must learn to do your own thinking, your own bullshitting, because our trashfire society runs on bullshit and for your own good you must become fluent in it, because very few people will bother to translate it for you. It was asinine in the late 90s, and it is asinine today, but it is the central truth of adult society: everything is bullshit, and you need to know what is going on beneath the bullshit, and you need to be able to bullshit back if necessary.

I know that the expectations being placed on you are ever-increasing, and I know that it does not seem rational to put effort into explaining the plot of a Charles Dickens novel to someone who has read the thing 50 times and will read 50 identical essays about it over the weekend. I know you are being handed ever-greater heaps of what is functionally mindless busywork because of an institutional obsession with metrics that don't actually measure learning in a useful way. High school was nightmarish in the 90s and I am fully aware that it has only gotten worse.

Nevertheless, you must try, if only for your own sake. Curiosity is your best hope, and dogged determination your best weapon. Learn, please, if only out of spite.

I was able to get an A on that paper because I was able to skim the reading, figure out what it was about, and bullshit for 1500 words in the space of 40 minutes.

Imagine what you can do if you learn to bullshit like I can bullshit.

For my senior year of AP English, I was assigned reading over Easter break. We were instructed to read The Old Man And The Sea, and save the rest of the short stories in the book for the first week back.

Unfortunately, what I heard was "read everything BUT The Old Man And The Sea."

Double unfortunately: the first day back was a test, on The Old Man And The Sea. Which I had read exactly zero words of. It was, notably, a short essay test. It wasn't multiple choice or fill in the blank. It was designed to require deliberate answers from scratch, entirely out of your own head, with nothing to go on BUT what was in your head.

And in the course of about 45 minutes, I was able to use the questions of the test itself to piece together a vague enough sense of how the story went to bullshit my way through other questions. I gave wide, thematic answers that were extremely light on details, since I did not know any of them, and did not even know this test would be happening until it was in front of me. An essay test for an AP-level English class.

I had a starting point of zero information, and an essay test about the thing I was supposed to have read.

I bullshitted my way to a B+ on it.

On a test I should have gotten a ZERO on.

It's been 16 years since I took that test.

I couldn't tell you a damn thing about The Old Man And The Sea.

But you better fucking believe I still know how to bullshit, and when someone is trying to bullshit me.

The power and utility of knowing how bullshit works CANNOT be overstated. It is one of the most important skills you can ever have.

cool aspec safe space, hey btw just checking, are aroallos allowed to talk about their experiences openly in here or will you cry and throw up and run away

cool aspec safe space, is your idea of aspec humor just "sex bad" btw? just checking aha

cool aspec safe space, i noticed you were selling merch too! wow, that's a great variety of acespec flags you got there, where are all the arospec ones btw? frayromantic, demiromantic, aroflux? aroallo? where are they? you have the asexual counterparts. where are they

cool aspec safe space, why are all the books about asexuality? why does every "meme" or "joke" told rely entirely on the audience being asexual? why does everybody here freak out when i say i'm not asexual? hey. hey cool aspec safe space. is it safe for me too

Hot take but actors are allowed to lie about their personal lives if that’s what it takes for them to have some privacy. Stop being nosy bitches they don’t owe you anything.

i’m going to hold your hands when i say this and i am only going to be kind about it once: ai does not belong in fandom spaces, ever. not in writing, not in art, not in video, not at all. it does not matter how bad you want to see your favourite characters kiss, or how much you need a bit of help finishing a chapter, or whatever.

make friends with artists. commission somebody. learn to draw yourself. ask for a beta read. try a writing partnership. fandom spaces are communities, so engage with them! it is about the journey and the fact that we all love something enough to create and build together about that thing.

spending 30 seconds to kill a tree and get an AI to push out some soulless empty piece of “content” is antithetical to the entire point of being engaged with fandom, and if you’ve taken to doing this you should really reconsider if you belong in these spaces with the rest of us.

you know the drill, op disabled reblogs etc etc etc

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.

Something I've been thinking a lot about recently is how inflexible I feel internet queers, especially young internet queers have gotten about labels. Just a lot of "Oh if you're <xyz identity> you can't use <abc term> to talk about yourself or refer to yourself." Or, on the flip side, "If you're <xyz identity> you must use <abc term> to label yourself."

And I just don't understand that. Whether it's telling bi women they can't identify as femme or butch or asking gender nonconforming and trans folks to identify themselves as TME/TMA, I just. Don't get it. Like, what do you get out of that? Is it a power trip, a chance to finally gatekeep folks out of a space just as we've been gatekept out of society?

Because the way I see it, from my own personal experience and being in IRL queer spaces and my IRL friend group being 99% queer folks, there's so much more flexibility. And such love for that flexibility. Someone on this site a while ago once described gender as one of those color wheel pickers. This thing:

And I think this applies really well to other queer identities in that it shows that people can identify as one of the primary colors, but also shows where those colors bleed and mix with each other. Because that's the thing, isn't it? Like if you identify as bi or pan, then realize you're actually a lesbian, or you identified as a butch lesbian and then realized you're a trans man, like there are spaces where those colors bleed together. It's not like there's a hard border with a sign saying "You Are Now Leaving Lesbianville!"

And I'm realizing as I get more comfortable embracing, and most importantly loving, my transmasculinity, these hard borders rankle me more. I saw a post recently where someone was talking about how uncomfortable they feel with trans men hypothetically referring to themselves as "lesboys." But that label, that identity makes so much sense to me. Like, say you exist for 10+ years in sapphic spaces, loving sapphics and in turn being loved by sapphics, and you realize that you're a trans man, you're just what. Supposed to cut yourself off from that identity? Because "you're a man now and I'm viewing your masculinity the same way as a cis man's and men have no place in sapphic spaces, so begone dirty man"? Like that bothers me. ESPECIALLY since there's a lot of overlap in experiences and creation of gender for cis butches and transmascs, including trans men. It's just like a different post talked about: defining your identity based on who/what it excludes makes it brittle and fragile, and instead focus on what your identity centers.

So yeah. I just think we, as a community, need to remember to be flexible and not erect borders where they don't exist.

memes from the starfleet ensigns group chat

Happy regular platypus :)

(dont ask why some colors change the original file looks good to me)

Kept seeing people in the notes saying something about a fedora

but i dont know why putting a fedora on him would make any differeHOLY SHIT

PERRY THE PLATYPUS???

Oh for sure

The second gif is from YESTERDAY don't do this to me

You're too late perry the platypus, i will use my 10K-NOTES-INATOR and make EVERYONE in the TRI-STATE AREA see this post!

Lo, there do I see my roommate

Lo, there do I see my d&d group, and Steve from work, and that guy whose name I don't know but it'd be weird to ask at this point

Lo, there do I see the whole line of my people, going back, back to the beginning

Lo, they do call to me. They bid me take my place among them, in the halls of Waffle House, where the brave may feast forever

hot take possibly? but i actually think it’s okay for things to be marketed for adults. it’s literally okay if things aren’t suitable for children. i feel like we are losing the plot

Arowana Dragon

[id: an illustration of an east asian dragon with a fish-like body, including blue and yellow scales and orange fins. it’s swimming through green water with several smaller fish around it. /end id.]

Ice cold takes from a Transgender Woman:

posting this for no particular reason