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JBB: An Artblog!
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Jules of Nature

izzy's playlists!
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year

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PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
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if i look back, i am lost

Love Begins

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trying on a metaphor

Janaina Medeiros
Peter Solarz
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"

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@bonesamongtherocksandroots
12" by 18", painted on top of covid rapid antigen test instructions
Hello tumblr. I’m reviving my old blog from the dead with some of my PHM fanarts.
This movie/book has gripped my soul a little too hard 😭
Lil Nas X gives a life update.
ok sorry to double reblog BUT I just looked him up and he does these fantastic videos where he breaks down HOW he actually mimics the other artists’ styles. Like for ed Sheeran, he explains how he brings his voice forward in the mouth, while Adam Levine sings in the back of the mouth, stuff like that. It’s SO COOL, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone actually break down how to do this sort of thing, as a skill, instead of just treating it like a neat trick they just happen to be good at. https://www.tiktok.com/@justinjmooremusic
Check him out he’s so cool
given the current climate this pride especially i feel i must mention that i love my trans friends, i stand with trans people in the fight against transphobic legislation and those who would enforce it, and this blog is not a good place for you to be if you do not vibe with that
They got me 😔
Steve: 1
Secret Service: 0
For those who don’t know, Steve Jackson Games was raided by the Secret Service in 1990, and all copies of the then-upcoming GURPS Cyberpunk were confiscated. Though this was bad for the company financially (they were set back months on a major project, and had to do layoffs), it did lend a certain air of pizazz to their product.
They ended up suing the government, and won. This was the first high-profile case for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which successfully sued on behalf of the company, winning around $300,000 in the case.
The full story is here: http://www.sjgames.com/SS/
GURPS Cyberpunk still bears a proud label on the cover that this is "The book that was seized by the US Secret Service!"
35 years ago today.
my lord. the two statues you commissioned are finally complete. yeah, the double-order with the vast and trunkless legs of stone and the shattered visage. i like to think we captured the sneer of cold command pretty well. it's a really thought-provoking piece my lord. very deconstructionist. i'm sure that even a traveller a thousand years from now could take one look at it and instantly recognise it must have come from an artistically enlightened culture
hey what’s up i’m totally not getting emotional over the first thing that human beings did after going further than they ever have being hugging each other in love and in grief and in camaraderie no not me
i love this lady's reaction to the crew saying they saw meteor impact flashes on the moon
EDIT: Her name is Dr. Kelsey Young!
moon joy !!!
The first photos are coming in from Artemis II, and they are stunning. Photos of our home planet from humans we are sending further than anyone has gone before.
And now two more. The first of which being taken by Commander Reid Wiseman just minutes from the other Blue Marble picture seen above, showcasing the effect of different camera setting on space photography. Pictures of our home, where all but four of us are looking up from.
I had this strange behaviour I've been puzzled about for my whole life, and I'm wondering if this is a common thing amongst people or if I'm just odd.
Embarrasingly, I used to be an anti-feminist when feminism was becoming more overtly mainstream during 2010's. However, what got me out of this phase was learning about terfs and how feminist women can be horribly transphobic and wrong against trans women. Even though I'm no expert on feminism, I find value and liberation with feminism when it is utilized in liberatory way. My hatred of feminism came from the harmful belief that "feminism is de-humanizing women by only allowing women to exist as people who are opressed by the patriarchy and men, therefore robbing agency and power from women", and it was learning that women and feminists aren't inheriently more innocent and harmless that made me more feminist. And that goes the same with other types of identities and activism, like anti racism and queer politics. Strangely, I feel more empowered when I see people with marginalized identities that I share with act horribly than when they're just talked about as the "opressed figures in opressive society". In fact, I feel dehumanized by the latter. I'm in NO WAY encouraging people with marginalized identities should be deliberately horrible, but this is more like how my mind functions. Why does my mind work like that? I'm a Gen Z person who grew up internalizing neoliberalism that is so prevalent in our contemporary society, so maybe that's the reason? Maybe seeing women behaving badly gives me some sort of illusion of liberation and empowerment because our society forces us to think in absolute binary of "the opressed and the opressor" amongst other things?
I didn't know how to feel about this mindset because it's 100% problematic, but I've been reading and enjoying your substacks lately (the one where you talk about how closeted trans people don't consider themselves as real people who have their own preference hit WAY TOO HARD for me) and thought maybe you would be interested in what I have to say.
I relate pretty heavily to what you say.
I found mainstream liberal feminism absolutely nauseating as a kid growing up in the 2000's, and in fact found chauvinistic, hookup-culturey anti-feminism/post-feminism far more alluring because it allowed me to think of myself as a free agent making a choice, rather than a 'victim' of circumstances.
A lot of systemic analyses of oppression can feel really disempowering and dehumanizing. Most theorizing about patriarchy, sexism, racism, etc, they don't offer you a hopeful route out of how you are being treated if you are marginalized, for one. And because we existing an ideologically very Christian and moralizing cultural milieu, we tend to equate suffering with goodness, and therefore are encouraged to see the marginalized as more pure and less complexly human than those who are not marginalized. But "positive" dehumanization is still dehumanization. To deny that a person can be as complex and shitty as anyone else simply because they are a victim of sexism, anti-Blackness, or ableism is to not allow them to be a full person.
Often the supposed moral superiority of the oppressed is used as an argument for the oppressed to be liberated -- as if their acceptance into society as full human beings is conditional. This is a burden that many marginalized people carry and internalize themselves. They think they must always behave patiently, understand others' perspectives, hold all the right opinions on all topics, and be perfect bastions of solidarity and political awareness if they are ever going to win freedom or be treated with any shred of respect. And if they falter from this pedastal on which they have been placed, they are punished far more severely than a non marginalized person would be, and they already have more to lose. This means talking about anything negative they feel or have done gets
Even as oppressed communities make some small social gains that take the form of improved media representation, things kinda get worse, because then there is a confused pressure placed on media depictions of marginalized people to make sure they are not stereotypic or even at all negative. To show a marginalized character being selfish, violent, crazy, or messy is assumed to be offensive innately. This means that the handful of women main characters, Black protagonists, etc that we see in our stories are unfailingly good and not very interesting or human, whereas our white boys get to be gritty and unfair and lashing out of trauma and just far far easier to relate to. This also gives us less opportunity to really flex our empathy for women, Black people, and other marginalized groups, because the narratives we consume literally ask us to do that less often than they ask us to take the perspective of a compelling sexy evil white boy.
I personally find really shmoopy, feel-good, simplistic depictions of members of my community to be just tooth-rottingly insincere. Most of the trans people that I know are fucking train wrecks and have hurt one another deeply! We do things like cheat on our partners, alienate our family members out of anger at past hurts that we never articulated and never offered a chance at redemption from, use substances to excess to cope with dysphoria, cast one another as villains in our traumatized minds' shadow plays, use our marginalized status to gain social media attention or fame, present our singular lived experiences as emblematic of our community as a whole, lie, act incredibly fucking racist and ableist, adopt pets we do not have the capacity to care for, and just about every other very human thing. I do not like a Love Simon style media depiction. I like my trans characters like Ames in Detransition, Baby, or the toxic couple of Joker the Harlequin and Mister J in The People's Joker.
I like when we fucking suck. I support women's wrongs. And in real life, I feel better and safer when I find myself in a community where people are allowed to fail. I hate AA because it's so forcibly Christian, but I *love* a lot of trans people who are in recovery, because they have a tolerance for bad behavior and a storied past of fuckups (and a tendency to romanticize those fuckups) that allows room for someone like me, a BPD-coded psycho trans person who has cheated, lied, cast normal people as villains when I was triggered and confused and stood to gain from having such a narrative of myself, started hormones and changed my name without telling anybody in my life for months, lightly stalked partners *and* has been stalked, and just generally is a human who has done a lot of crazy shit and learned from it.
There are sympathetic reasons why I did some of the more fucked up stuff I have done, but I fundamentally do not think of myself or other people as moral agents, rather I see us as social animals who will do nearly whatever we can to preserve social ties when those things are under attack, because ostracism feels like death and often literally is for us. I resonate the most with the girlies and gays who have also been kinda vile and desperate under such circumstances, I think oppression does contribute to it but that it does not excuse it or fully explain it, and I like that human beings are just animals akin to any other. We are all capable of harm and hurt and silliness and chaos and that is so much more interesting than being good.
There is nothing problematic with you liking what you like. Having emotions is not a moral action. Having preferences is not a moral action. Those things are just feelings, and they exist within you regardless of whether you acknowledge them as real, but it's generally better to acknowledge them.
And I reckon you probably have a lot of good reasons to feel most comfortable among terrible women and problematic people of color etc.
Do you feel more safe when there is room to make a mistake?
Do you like being around people who don't require you have a harsh filter placed upon yourself?
Do you find it easy to forgive others, but not yourself?
Do you think all marginalized people deserve grace and the dignity of a comfortable, safe life, even if they have been pieces of shit?
If your answer to these questions are generally yes, then it's no wonder your prefer the problematic among us to the virtuous! None of us really are virtuous after all. We're just living things. And that's enough! It's gratifying and humanizing to see that side of things, not just us being talked about as angels.
Just so we’re all clear:
Things that you SHOULD NOT deadname
Trans women
Trans men
Non binary people
Any other trans identity that doesn’t fit into those three
Cis people who changed their name
Anyone who goes by a different name then the one their parents gave them regardless of how “good” of a person they are, or your personal feeling towards them
Things that you SHOULD deadname
“They’re just looking for attention.”
Oh, a human being is seeking a social response? Human being, the social animal wired to make and track social connection? A human desires the vital blood that permitted their species to survive for millennia? The human being who was born completely helpless and primed in every way by nature to seek attention and help from their community?
Wow that’s crazy. How embarrassing. Humiliating even. Should we isolate them from community? Should we call Wire Mother?
Today, I have outlived the release of this record by 7 years. Would be nice if this record would be less relevant, and was simply detailing a difficult time in both my life and in our shared history that has long since been confined to the past. Sadly our world had other plans. So did my autonomic nervous system. It never ceases to surprise me when somebody states that this record helped them come out. If being trans is social contagion that spreads by promising happiness, then this is probably the worst advertisement for 'transgender ideology' conceivable. Probably because it is evident that transitioning has nothing to do with happiness at all. I am still not a happy individual, and have come to accept I likely never will be. If you start using a utilitarian calculus on your own life - and your life has been a difficult one simply because of who you are - then you quickly come to some dark conclusions. That is exactly how I ended up in the ER of St. Vincent's Hospital months prior to this records release. I didn't realise this record was 'honest'. In reality, I censored the lyrics heavily in order to obscure references to real people using metaphor. Stuck on what to sing about, I was told to "write what you know". I followed this advice literally. I wasn't really aware of the taboo around singing about the topics of the record things I discussed - depression, dysphoria, regret, sex work, abuse etc. It is honest simply as I did not read the room. I did not realise that for most people in music social convenience and money were more important. Things are more difficult now than ever. They may be difficult for the rest of our lives. But what makes lives bearable is not happiness. Happiness means very little if you are surrounded by lies. Suffering likewise becomes unbearably pointless without reference to a truth. Without truth - and acting faithfully upon that truth - nothing is bearable. That is why we have such high rates of attempted and completed ... well, you all know the story of the cover already. However, I'd still like to make a case for remaining alive. -- 2026 marks 10 years since I came out and began medical transitioning. As of a few days ago, I am on the waitlist for a sex change (yes, sex can indeed be changed!). I tasked for a BA too, as Ritalin seems to keep me too thin and flat for my liking. The list is free but the wait is years long - and I still have a lot of rehabilitation from chronic illness to do before getting a surgery that will mess me up for months (and will itself require more rehabilitation). However, the very fact that such a service exists - provided by the Monash Gender Clinic - is a privilege, even if it is slow. The wait is likely going to be more painful than the recovery, the dilation or the inevitable complications. I thought I had minimal dysphoria regarding my genitalia, but really it was cope. It built up slowly over time the more I neglected it, to the point of it wrecking havoc on my self-confidence and relationships. I'd like to wear a bikini or use a change room without my life being in danger. I'd like to have a comfortable bath without bubbles or sex without zoning out. I just want to be done with it, so I can move onto the next problem. Sorry, chasers. But turns out despite all the truthfulness I allegedly demonstrated in my music, I still wasn't being totally truthful with myself. --
And that is really what the record is about. Admittedly it has taken me years to really understand my own record, as I was very dissociated while making it (while abusing dissociatives). It isn't primarily about depression, or any specific mental malaise. Many cis people seem to get the record too - so it is more than about being a stereotypically depressed transsexual too. It's about something else, perhaps. While it is true that truth is good, it is not even remotely pleasurable. It has nothing to do with happiness. It is often completely indifferent to our wellbeing. For Plato, escaping the cave is certainly not pleasurable. It is easier to remain in there seduced by the puppets casting funny little shadows on the walls. The light outside hurts. It's too bright. But there are far more important things at stake. "Slowly, [her] eyes adjust to the light of the sun. First [she] can see only shadows. Gradually [she] can see the reflections of people and things in water and then later see the people and things themselves. Eventually, [she] is able to look at the stars and moon at night until finally [she] can look upon the sun itself." (edit mine) Upon seeing the sun for the first time, would it not make sense for this prisoner to feel a deep and profound grief? Would there not be a period of mourning all those years misspent in the cave? The discovery of a truth is not joyous - truth rarely has anything to do with joy at all. Truth hurts. Facts don't care about feelings. Why is truth so slow, and so difficult to encounter? Why is she so fragile that it can easily be redacted without consequence, or shattered under the butt of a gun? This mourning is also melancholia, as not some external object that is lost, but ourselves. We are nothing without the truths that make our life intelligible and bearable. Once you start seeing truth as painful, suddenly the horrid age we live in makes a lot more sense. Might as well just seek (sadistic, nihilistic, empty) pleasure instead. It is certainly easier. So I guess that's the message: be honest with yourself even if it makes everything worse. Live for something more than happiness. Don't survive merely out of spite, as spite alone does not grant a life meaning. Nor does happiness. Something more is needed. Live for a truth that cannot be calculated, even if it tortures you. No love, artwork, scientific discovery or political revolution - or transition - can be reduced to a mere utilitarian calculus. You don't need to believe in a god to commit oneself to the Absolute. You won't have fun, and you won't be happy. There's unlikely to be any reward for doing so in the hereafter. But you will be able to bear the life that you currently have. You will have a life that makes sense. Love what you will never believe twice. Fight for it too.
Happy valentines day -Xandra