Thanks to bluehairedprotag for the new icon

[targetedknowledge]

[bltchkawa]

Sticker number 7!!!!!!! Non-binary vampire :P

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

I see that "learned helplessness" is the hot new psychological term getting wildly misused. the phrase you're looking for is "weaponized incompetence," babes

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

weaponized incompetence is when your partner does chores shitty on purpose so that you stop asking them to do chores. learned helplessness is when you've experienced so much trauma that you've developed the mindset that you can't meaningfully change your situation and have become accordingly passive.

if your partner is exhibiting learned helplessness they aren't manipulating you, they're displaying a trauma response.

[ickaimp]

So this is not a plea for money. This is something that surprised me, and chatting with people on discord, they were unaware of as well.

Discovered last year I couldn’t look at my 2015 MacBook Air without it triggering nausea and migraines, and figured the screen died. Have been getting by on my phone, but concluded I really need a laptop again.

Saved up, realised I could afford a brand new MacBook Neo, and got one.

-And I couldn’t spend more than five minutes looking at the screen without massive eye strain, nausea, vertigo, and if I pushed it, I-need-to-lie-down-in-a-dark-room-for-hours migraines.

Looking up MacBook and Eyestrain explained what is going on. The liquid retina displays that Apple currently has uses Pulse Width Modulation or PWM. In order to give the screens a deeper depth of colour and contrast, PWM flickers between several hundred to thousand times a second.

And there is currently no way to turn it off. There are settings and apps to reduce it, but there is no way to stop the screen from flickering. Checked Apple forums, called Apple Support, and the time I could look at the screen kept shrinking. Got the laptop Tuesday, returned it Friday, today is Sunday and I’m still dealing with a vertigo migraine.

For MacBooks, it seems to vary on the computer model and the software it uses. In retrospect, the issue with my MacBook Air started after a major software update.

And it’s not just an Apple thing. Current Windows and Android screens do the same thing. There’s even a Reddit for people who are sensitive to PWM flickers to help find computers and screens that won’t trigger eyestrain and headaches.

So, yeah. This week has been a learning experience. But for those who are prone to headaches and migraines, this may be something to be aware of, cause I was not.

[pinknatural]

the writers of spn: we have to keep dean and cas apart so they won’t seem gay (writes cas away from dean)

dean: where’s cas? where’s cas? where’s cas? i’m not moving until i know that cas is ok

[bltchkawa]

Pride sticker 6!!!!! Rainbow flag, CRAZY that I haven’t done that yet.

[intersexelphie]

I want to boost everything this person has said and add on.

The reason I call myself a tomboy now, despite it being seen as a childish word and having had someone swear at me over it because ‘tHeRe’S nO suCh thInG as BoY thInGs anD giRL thIngS sHut uP’ is because I couldn’t call myself that or be like that when I was a kid. It was seen as a negative thing and I was already bullied enough. “Looking like a boy” was the worst thing that could happen to a girl.

And I’m not even 26 yet. We aren’t talking 30+ years ago, we are talking 2000s and even 2010s. It’s only since trans people have become more accepted in the past few years that gender nonconformity has too.

And the people who helped me accept my gender nonconformity more than anyone else? Were trans people. They taught me, “there’s nothing wrong with how you feel. You’re still a valid woman no matter what you wear, how you have your hair or what you’re into ❤️”

And don’t even get me started on how people treat gender nonconforming men. JK Rowling has a lot of nerve to be like “uwu boys can wear dresses and only us gendercrits accept that!” when she has, even in recent works, made femininity in men a negative trait, as well as making masculinity in women a negative trait also.

A lot of people still don’t accept gnc people even now. Just last year I had someone tell me they’d never let their daughter “dress like a boy”, and I’m always terrified to walk into a bathroom in case the next JK Rowling is in there, sees my gender expression and pepper sprays me or worse.

“There’s no such thing as boy things and girl things.” I don’t need to be told that and I’m sure 99% of trans people also don’t need to be told that. Tell that to the society that hates us both instead of actively encouraging that hate.

[androgynealienfemme]

Gonna point out the og tweet thread is now full of terfs saying that life was better for gay people in the fucking 80s, that it was super easy for them to be a tomboy in the 70s and 80s and therefore it must have been that way for everyone, and that it was totally acceptable to be a gnc gay person in the 80s! 🤪

They’re rewriting history as we speak to try to argue trans acceptance is making it harder to be gay and gnc for youth than it was to be gay in the 80s. This is a blatant lie.

[trans-mask-left]

The fucking 80s??? As in, “aids crisis” 80s?? As in, “the government actively avoided funding research to help gay people” 80s????

Man I knew terfism was brain rot but I didn’t think it was this bad.

[socialistexan]

Actually I'm not going to just keep this in the tags

[play-now-my-lord]

Many people think the problem with cultural appropriation is inauthenticity (vague, nebulous) rather than marginalized people functionally getting robbed

[play-now-my-lord]

The discourse afaik started with the very real and very insidious practice of white producers functionally dominating Black music for decades, paying Black artists peanuts or nothing & pushing for (better-paid, more mainstream-palatable) white artists playing in Black styles. In the sphere I'm most personally familiar with, it looks like most indigenous artforms that white people encounter in their lives being produced by and for settlers, and the profits largely being aggregated to settlers while traditional ndn artists struggle. I think using the terminology and losing sight of the economic damage - especially in favor of more nebulous frames like cultural authenticity - is doing real harm by dilution and contributing to the very thing it purports to fight

[hotvampireadjacent]

Good.

[lakemojave]

Reblog if you also hope that the Chinese people can eat delicious fruit

[batmanshole]

crisp glass of water moodboard

[nespolkey]

Back again. I give you this guy

[bltchkawa]

Pride sticker number 5!!!!!! Gender-fluid mermaid goromi because I am not immune to puns. Anyways,, who wanna play mermaids w her?

[seasononesam]

7x03 // 14x16

Your music? Dad's. Do you even have an original thought?

[werepire05]

[yourlocalgrammarfreak]

Fun fact! Dean was born in 1979

In its first month too

As soon as his first kid was born, this guy stopped enjoying any and all kinds of music

[pangur-and-grim]

we have to write poems in my creative writing certificate program, so I pieced something together from Belphie's medical reports

[pangur-and-grim]

my professor really liked this and said that it should be 'the nucleus of a chapbook' (so like 15-30 poems of the same theme that I would attempt to get published) but now I feel awkward because I think that she thinks HE DIED? but it turns out, everything will be alright! his heart recovered! the FIP meds are working!

[pangur-and-grim]

if I do make a chapbook, this will be the next page:

[pangur-and-grim]

and then this will be the page after that:

[pangur-and-grim]

I couldn't believe how fast he went from death's door to running and playing once we got the GS441525 into him. I am so incredibly grateful to everyone who's spent their time researching and legislating it!!

[pangur-and-grim]

by the way, there's still a few copies of this chapbook left! they're up at greerstothers.shop

[pangur-and-grim]

down to the last three copies! I won't be reprinting, so please grab it now if you want one

[dykepuffs]

There is a really frustrating thing where some kinds of speculative story are hard to write because they will be assumed to be bad (clumsy, harmful, regressive) metaphors for real-world events or people, rather than exploring completely speculative ideas. Like:

"What if a small group of religious extremists, persecuted in their own country, moved to an inhospitable uninhabited island and had to rebuild society there?" - But the Americas and Australia weren't inhospitable and were full of Native nations, why are you perpetuating the idea of Terra Nullius and manifest destiny? - Yes, that's because this isn't a metaphor for the British invading other countries, it's a metaphor for finding out how much of a person's religious practise is rooted in worldly concerns, vs how much they will really stymie themselves for the sake of God.

"What if 1/100 children born was a werewolf?" - But queer people are no danger to straight people, and disabled people don't have predictable patterns to their illnesses, and most people who have uncontrollable rages really CAN control them and are just lying, and no minority group has superpowers... - Yes, but that's all immaterial, because I wanted to talk about a load of other metaphors about the passage of time and responsibility and the relationship between humans and wildlife.

It almost feels like death of the author, like "Death of the most obvious metaphor" - If you couldn't reach for the (tormented) parallel between being an alien species and being stateless, what stories could someone tell? If your changeling-baby was neither disabled nor adopted, what would the story be about? Etc.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

I was literally just thinking about this yesterday! It's a trend I've seen a LOT in recent years in lit crit, particularly when discussing fantasy.

I think it particularly comes up the moment an author includes any sort of marginalisation/oppression for their fictional/fantasy world. I've lost count of the times now where I've seen people read a book on, say, the terrible oppression of the Gwyllion, and immediately gone "Oh, so the Gwyllion are a metaphor for the real world X people, either deliberately or accidentally through the author's inherent racism. This is therefore super problematic because the Gwyllion are also described as Y, which means the author is also saying that about X people."

There will always be real world parallels when discussing oppression. Always. But that's because oppression is oppression - precise details may vary, but it follows the same pathways the world over, and that will naturally be copied into fiction as well. This does not mean the author is intentionally telling the exact allegory that you've projected onto it. If that's how you read everything, then yeah, everything becomes super problematic, but also, why are you reading any fiction that isn't solely about real world historical events? It's clearly not for you

And, you know, obviously there are works that are racist/misogynistic/etc, including deliberately so. But I really don't like the way people have started going "I have spotted a PROBLEMATIC ALLEGORY here, I'm ever so smart" and acting like they're the cleverest little critic that ever lived. You have to meet a work on its own terms. Lovecraft was a big ole racist, sure. Someone who has written a book about the oppression of magic users in their fantasy world, however, is rarely writing a story about how queerness lurks in family lines and must be controlled; they are way more commonly writing a story about a world with magic that they then wanted to take seriously, and while there might well be elements of queerness there, those magic users are not a 1:1 replacement.

Sometimes these lines are blurry! But we're going way too far to one end of that spectrum

The post that got me thinking about this yesterday was someone talking about how they'd love to write a vampire story exploring vampirism as a disability (dependence on a substance to manage the condition, blindness/weakness in daytime, can't enter buildings without accommodation, etc). But, they said, they can't, because they don't want to be making the point that disabled people are parasites, and vampires are generally considered parasitic.

And like. What an incredible shame. That we'll lose that, because they're already afraid of the "I have spotted a PROBLEMATIC ALLEGORY" crowd. That would be a great story for exploring disability themes, OR just a great new take on vampires, and either of those things would be so good to read. But there would be so many people who would jump in with "So you think disabled people are draining the life force of the ableds around them?", never stopping to actually think "Vampires are not a 1:1 stand in for real world disability because they are fictional and do not exist."

Anyway sorry I've rambled here, not sure how coherent I'm being. But yes, I was thinking about this just yesterday! Wild.

[bltchkawa]

Pride sticker 3!!! Lesbo cop bc I said so.

I’ve never done pride art before this series and it has become extremely special to me and I am very excited to draw more goromis :3

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[thistlearts]

I've been saying this for ages. Being called a Luddite is a compliment and badge of honour, not an insult.