Untitled

[bathroomcube]

[comixextra]

[roach-works]

it’s what they would have wanted

[iobotomypop]

happy moonwalk day

[sweaterkittensahoy]

Things Michael Collins absolutely would have done given the chance.

[kusali]

I don't blame the girls (except in specific fringe cases) but it's annoying how every popular on social media sex worker is "elite" or "high class", talking about making 100k a month on OF and saying "oh I just fell into it, it was easy for me". Like one woman who describes herself alternately as a woman who fucks men for money and a high class escort was a professional ballerina before doing this, and while she isn't as lithe and feminine as that might imply there are obvious class markers between "high class" escorts and the middling ones. Then the gap between the middling ones and most marginalised becomes less about how you talk and where you went to school (in fact it's not about that at all) and more about 1. how far removed you are from normative beauty standards and 2. How visibly poor you are. Eg even tho my teeth are mess I'm still doing okay, but if I was also visibly trans and also visibly over the age of 50 (for example) I would be dealing with the most difficult work, the worst pay, and the heaviest policing. This used to be talked about a lot on here circa 2010s but since #swtumblr is no more I have no idea if the general public is aware of this internal class division we usually call "the whorearchy"

A client who I really dislike was telling me that he hired a different escort for $900 - so firmly a "high class escort" - and that she was so amazing and he didn't know "it" could be this way, but she didn't make him cum. I always do, yet he spoke about her as if she had some intrinsic quality that placed her above the regular girls like myself even when he admits that, in defining this by his own goal (which is to cum, something he struggles with) I, the mid range escort, am better at the job. So what is it about her?

Unfortunately I didn't ask (I should have, he was smoking meth and probably would have told me anything at this point) but at first I figured it was the signifier of the money itself along with what he says were her stunning features. But after spending some time today watching this other escort on Instagram, the former ballerina, who is beautiful but not The Most Normatively Attractive Woman Ever, who looks like a regular (albeit lovely) person, I'm coming to the conclusion that it's the unspoken social mores the ruling class use to keep even the young and beautiful working class women out. I have plenty of rich clients with important jobs, and some are even petite bourgeois*, but none are ruling class

*I'm putting small business owners in this category, eg the dude who runs some kind of fitness.. whatever, that obviously relies on the patronage of the wealthy to exist at all, it isn't producing anything in the classical sense but it is relying on the wealth of the ruling class to exist at all

[dorothylarouge]

In order to do good worldbuilding you need to be able to think politically and that requires understanding politics

[dorothylarouge]

How do the gnomes of the mushroom village govern themselves and how do they determine the legitimacy of the Giggleking who rules them? These are questions you must be able to answer.

[nitw]

my entire body hurts i'm sobbing so bad over this holy shit

[boringkate]

It's so cool when a woman is a pervert!

[json-derulo]

having the Aviation Accident Investigations Autism™️ has actually done wonders for the way I process and respond to my own fuck-ups

[json-derulo]

And I don't just mean "oh, my little work mistake is actually nothing compared to a fiery crash that kills people," either. The reason commercial flight is so many orders of magnitude safer than any other form of transportation is because after every accident and incident, an independent regulatory body investigated it with the express goal of figuring out exactly what happened, why, and how to prevent the same thing from ever happening again—not to root out which person deserved the blame or the liability.

It's a simple, shockingly effective idea. It's also worlds away from how most people approach their own mistakes and the mistakes of others.

[json-derulo]

Because it’s never just one person’s fault. And even when it is, it still isn’t. 

The sharpest, best-trained pilots make worse decisions when they're tired or sick or stressed out, so there's two of them. The most dedicated and experienced air traffic controllers garble an instruction over the radio sometimes, so pilots are trained to always repeat clearances back to catch misunderstandings quickly. The best and brightest maintenance mechanic still overlooks a screw or misconnects a wire once or twice in her career, so aircraft systems are built with two or three or four layers of redundancy, and pilots are exhaustively trained to deal with failures safely. 

Everyone eventually has a bad day. Every component breaks down. Every computer gets a bad a Windows update and spirals into a reboot doom loop. If it’s possible for one person’s mistake to domino into a mushroom cloud of a fuckup, then that task is too critical to be one person's sole responsibility. The accident sequence starts with the design of the system—so how do you improve the system to keep it from happening again?

[json-derulo]

oh yeah. The “modern commercial aviation is the safest form of transport” thing only applies to planes, btw. A helicopter is a beautiful metal horse that wants to break its legs and die so so so badly

[thelawfulchaotic]

This is such a good example of systemic solutions to problems!! Putting it in my pocket for explaining problem-solving vs. blame and punishment in the future.

[mistresssheo]

Tja

Found here 🦋

[translating-german-to-english]

Depending on context:

* well then.

* ain't nothing you can do about it.

* well how about that then.

* you brought that upon yourself dude.

* it is what it is.

* that was completely to be expected.

* told you so.

[translatingpoststogerman]

Je nach Kontext:

* tja.

* tja.

* tja.

* tja.

* tja.

* tja.

* tja.

[guerrillatech]

[lemoncat101]

[datura-inoxia]

Nature is healing

[drudg30n]

[theconcealedweapon]

[animentality]

[miraclemaya]

dress up is one of the most important pillars of gameplay that is often ignored by game developers to disasterous results

[anywhoozles]

[wrens-roost]

"This is Ankh-Morpork, you know. We've got extra pronouns here."

GNU Terry Pratchett

[iconuk01]

The full quote is fascinating though, and adds an interesting context as it's Angua (a werewolf) and Carrot (human, but raised by dwarves) discussing a dwarf colleague, Cheery.

"Female? He told you he was female?" "She," Angua corrected. "This is Ankh-Morpork, you know. We've got extra pronouns here." She could smell his bewilderment... "Well, I would have though she'd have the decency to keep it to herself," Carrot said finally. "I don't think it's very clever, you know, to go around drawing attention to the fact." "Carrot, I think you might have something wrong with your head," said Angua. "What?" "I think you might have it stuck up your bum."

Sir Terry Pratchett - "Feet of Clay"

This is CARROT being the asshole. Carrot who has, throughout all the prior books, been depicted as basically the best of all possible people. He is noble, brave, considerate, kind. He is the good guy in the entire City...

... and yet, he grew up dwarf, and has picked up their more conservative views on gender identity.

Discworld dwarves start out in the books as basically a people without visible gender differences (thanks to the woman growing beards just like the men) and using "he/him" pronouns as their default. Anything else is seen as breaking the most basic of social conventions. (Dwarf dating is described early on as being two dwarves who like each other spending an inordinately long time trying to find out, as tactfully as possible, what gender the other dwarf is)

Carrot does immediately adopt the "she" pronoun for Cheery, which is but wishes she didn't make such a fuss about it. He's prepared to tolerate her choices, but he doesn't APPROVE of them, and thinks that that is enough.

Carrot, because he IS Carrot, does learn to open his mind on this subject, perhaps his final frontier of bias, but I do love that it's addressed as something he has to work on, and succeed.

And to Terry Pratchett's credit what started out as a throwaway joke about dwarf sex, gradually becomes a multi-volume subplot which is a fascinating exploration of gender and social identity as more dwarves start to "come out" as being female, and not just identifying as female, but changing their form of dress to something which matches who they are (they keep their beards though, because to a dwarf, that has nothing to do with gender, and everything to do with being a dwarf) and how their society has to adjust, with differing levels of comfort, to this new reality.

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

Carrot was also prejudiced against the undead early on as well. And the fact that he unlearns these views is a good example of a common theme in Pratchett's work

The overwhelming theme of Pratchett's work is change. Not good vs evil but progress vs stasis/going backwards. The protagonists of Pratchett's stories are people who can take on board new ideas and change and grow and adapt. Some of them start out as very stupid people with very stupid views in fact until they learn and grow and improve. The villains on the other hand are people who desperately want things to either stay the same or regress back to some imagined "Good old days" that they prefer.

[homoqueerjewhobbit]

While we're talking about Terry Pratchett gender, there's also golems, who are basically lumps of clay that have been brought to life but don't actually have any gender or secondary sexual characteristics so everyone defaults to male and he/him. As the books story goes on some of them decide to try being women just because.

[yukinojou]

Feet of Clay came out in 1996. I cannot overstate how pronoun discourse wasn't anywhere on the radar then. I'm fairly terminally online, active in fandom, and the first I can remember is some timid discussion of neopronouns in the mid-2000s, where "how could you tell other people to use them for you" was a major puzzle. (I still love neopronouns - zie/hir appeals to me in a way they distinctly doesn't, genderfluid though I am.)

[prismatic-bell]

ALSO also also

1) I don't have the book to hand, but when Cheery comes out she changes her name to Cheri, because "sometimes, when you shout who you are to the whole world, you need to do it quietly." It's such a beautiful expression of coming out being a process, and one that needn't be undertaken all at once.

2) Pterry had the best goyische take I've ever seen on golems, and I will die on that hill. It's not perfect, but it is really well-done, and it was done with respect, and to me that might be even more important than perfection.

[strawberry-wizzard]

I had the book to hand because I reread it recently. The quote goes:

When you've made up your mind to shout out who you are to the world, it's a relief to know that you can do it in a whisper.

[prismatic-bell]

THERE we go.

[oneheadtoanother]

[kropotkindersurprise]

Critical support to these scammers weaponizing homophobia to drain right-wingers' bank accounts 🫡

[oak23]

Marie Kondo really isnt fucking around

[oak23]

If anyone is curious what she says directly after this quote: 

When one or the other of these thought patterns makes it hard to throw things away, we can’t see what we really need now, at this moment. We aren’t sure what would satisfy us or what we are looking for. As a result, we increase the number of unnecessary possessions, burying ourselves both physically and mentally in superfluous things. 

The best way to find out what we really need is to get rid of what we don’t. Quests to faraway places or shopping sprees are no longer necessary. All you have to do is eliminate what you don’t need by confronting each of your possessions properly. The process of facing and selecting our possessions can be quite painful. It forces us to confront our imperfections and inadequacies and the foolish choices we made in the past.

 Many times when confronting my past during the tidying process I have been so ashamed. My collection of scented erasers from primary school, the animation-related goods that I collected in junior high school, clothes I bought in high school when I was trying to act grown up but which didn’t suit me at all, handbags I bought even though I didn’t need them just because I liked the look of them in the shop. 

The things we own are real. They exist here and now as a result of choices made in the past by no one other than ourselves. It is wrong to ignore them or to discard them indiscriminately as if denying the choices we made. This is why I am against both letting things pile up and dumping things without proper consideration. It is only when we face the things we own one by one and experience the emotions they evoke that we can truly appreciate our relationship with them. 

There are three approaches we can take towards our possessions. Face them now, face them sometime, or avoid them until the day we die. The choice is ours. But I personally believe it is far better to face them now. If we acknowledge our attachment to the past and our fears for the future by honestly looking at our possessions, we will be able to see what is really important to us. 

This process in turn helps us to identify our values and reduces doubt and confusion when making life decisions. If we can have confidence in our decisions and launch enthusiastically into action without any doubts holding us back, we will be able to achieve much more. In other words, the sooner we confront our possessions the better. If you are going to put your house in order, do it now.

[namethatghostling]

stop drinking beer with the deer and come have a cider with the spiderrrr

[critical-objects-deactivated202]

Laura Aguilar is a Los Angeles-based photographer whose work mines the intersection between feminism, body image, queer politics, and latinx identity. Her earliest works depicted latina lesbians in intimate portraits, calling to mind the frankness of Catherine Opie, while her best known series features self-portraits of Aguilar posed nude in the California desert landscape. These photographs are instantly striking, finding in the artist’s body formal elements that echo the landscape itself, as in its doubling here with the giant rock that eludes the frame. Aguilar also forces our gaze onto a body that does not conform to stereotypical images of latinx or feminine identity—a body type that is not so much othered as invisible, despite its ubiquity. The artist originally began to produce these photos as a means of grappling with her own issues with weight and self-acceptance, but quickly came to see them as something more. They offer a profound, ambivalent vision of woman and nature. We see Aguilar dissolve into the landscape in search of anonymity, at the same time that she reclaims the pride and beauty in her body far removed from the society that rejects it.

Laura Aguilar, Grounded #111, 1992