Yee, and I mean this wholeheartedly, Haw

LJ. any pronouns. 30s. Bi. Butch. “TRA”. 🇵🇸✡️ דאָיִקייט “Must be fate, Mulder...Root beer."

[cock-holliday]

While people have been laughing at the ridiculousness of dems doing Red Scare shit "in 2026", the state department has been trying to connect left wing action, groups, and people to a network of "Cuban Communist Terrorism"

"Cuba’s assault on the United States was never, at root, a quarrel over economic policy or sovereignty or even ownership of a particular territory. It was a revolution against Western civilization itself — waged, in part, via the novel and insidious method of persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance."

On the targets list include

Orgs:

The Jericho Movement -- an org dedicated to political prisoners

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) -- demsoc political coalition with countless casual members across the US

Code Pink -- a women-led anti-war group that has been getting a lot of traction right now for its pro-Palestine demonstration

The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) -- a group similar to the ACLU, though more explicitly supportive of radical action. Best known for being the org behind protest hotlines and famous on tumblr for their "shut the fuck up" video about demanding your right to silence when harassed by police

People:

Angela Davis -- former radical activist and now author and professor. She has been a pivotal voice in Black feminist analysis and critique of mass incarceration.

Amy Goodman -- Democracy Now! reporter

Ben Cohen -- The Ben of Ben and Jerrys

Medea Benjamin -- a leader in Code Pink who, despite being a gentle older woman, was smeared for having "attacked" politicians she verbally confronted

Black and Cuban alliances are vaguely referenced or defunct partnerships are listed, but this is clearly an avenue they are still worried about.

This website loves the "first they came for the communists" poem but refuse to understand that whether you identify yourself with communism or not, leftist positions, particularly those opposed to the genocide in Palestine and critical of the mass incarceration system, are all they need to pretend you are working on behalf of a foreign agency to impede their goals of a white supremacist state.

Oppose this shit NOW, even if they can't get you with it yet.

[sawed-on-shotgun]

call me an annoying killjoy but i dont think its funny to generalize and make fun of any minority. including trans men. in fact i think its transphobic and bigoted to make fun of the existence of trans men and their desire to be respected and wouldnt fly with literally any other group of people

[farenmaddox]

I have just found. the COOLEST website???

Lost Kitchen Scrolls

It has a huge variety of historical recipes from different regions, taken from manuscripts, transcribed and translated, and a whole section of notes about the context for the recipe. It's really fun and I AM going to try a couple of these recipes.

Look at how this lamb recipe is presented:

This is just such a fun way to learn more about historical foodways and discover traditional cuisine.

Look at all the filters you can use:

Maybe if I can forage some good blackberries this year, I can make a 300 year old recipe for blackberry wine!

Anyway. Check out Lost Kitchen Scrolls.

[cock-holliday]

Ngl I get the vibe that a lot of these transradfems don't even seem to believe that cis women experience misogyny at all. They seem truly convinced that transmisogny is the only valid form of oppression, whilst also being a virtue to suffer from, and that other forms of oppression exist only as theoretical talking points

"You don't know what it's like to be viewed as a sex object first and a human second" I do, in fact, know what that's like. So do a good 97% of cis women who have been catcalled. Transmisogny is real, and there are many aspects to it I don't and will never know what it's like to experience first hand, but our experiences are more similar than they are different, and I'm so thankful that most trans women actually embrace this

Yeah, there definitely are ones who DO believe that. At the most extreme you get "AFAB privilege" and sweeping statements about "TMEs" meant to hit trans men that are both ridiculous for trans men but more obviously ridiculous for cis women. Stuff like "TMEs don't have to fear rape."

It's just disappointing because there is soooo much to critique about cis feminism--so so much--but it's not a useless theory. There is a LOT, especially in Black feminist works, queer feminist works, disabled feminist works, that really gets into the meat of sexism and misogyny and how these things interact with other identity factors. There is a fuckload of good cis critique within cis feminism.

Transfeminism isn't just a distant offshoot but an answer to the question cis feminism fails to answer. If you begin and end at transfeminism--or worse, radfeminism with a trans flavor and pretend it's transfeminism--you are missing an enormous part of the conversation.

And trans people have been responding to cis feminism for a long time. Transfeminism is only a bit over 25 years old as a defined theory. But Butler and Feinberg and Bornstein and Bergman and Halberstam and Koyama have been writing about trans people in feminism for a long time. Critiques from cis people that reflect a trans experience far predates you or me or Serano.

It's a shame that trans people are finding a home in such a reactionary sect of old feminist movements as if radfemism and mainstream feminism was all there was--again, another false binary. Feinberg critiqued Marxist feminists rushing to radfeminism while I was still in diapers. These arguments are so cyclical and have been thoroughly debunked each time they've come up, but I guess the separatist route feels safer when you can't stop spiraling about who is "safe" vs a "threat" based not on actions but identity.

I can only hope that more and more people see the long accumulation of this fight and come to the right conclusions that leads us to liberation and not lateral piss-matches.

[typhlonectes]

[viceisvice]

[currentlycryingaboutlancelot]

obviously this is AI generated slop but I keep laughing at ophelia labeled “hamlet’s brother”

[currentlycryingaboutlancelot]

very interested in the 523 likes in the corner supporting this groundbreaking interpretation of ophelia

[currentlycryingaboutlancelot]

king blyssffsttt my good friend king blyssffsttt

[currentlycryingaboutlancelot]

[inthefallofasparrow]

HAMLET My brother? KING BLYSSFFSTTT No, the other Ophelia

[cock-holliday]

That tag meme got me thinking so much about my old TLOU fic. I said on there but in like 2017-2018 the devs were really leaning into the speculation that Abby was going to be Anna, Ellie's mom who we assumed had died. I thought this was the route they'd take and was so excited for a story where we got to see flashbacks of what Anna had gotten up to and who she was, parallel her to Joel, and then tackle themes of family. What if Anna felt entitled to Ellie as her bio daughter? We know Joel is territorial. How would Ellie define her family? Blood versus chosen? A woman she doesn't know who birthed her versus a man she has bonded tightly with? Does she REALLY know either of them? Would she have to choose at all? Cool potential themes! I didn't want to speculate more so I decided to write a fic instead during the 3/4 decade hiatus that was a simple parallel to game 1.

In the story, Joel and Ellie are crucially given time to recover in Jackson, and Ellie actually copes well around other people but Joel has to struggle with restlessness. He doesn't know how to define himself when he's not managing crisis. Explores the trauma of safety after trauma! He teaches Ellie to swim and play guitar and over the course of teaching her, continues to feel useful, but as she learns to gain independence from him he struggles with knowing what to do with himself. I gave him a love interest--a man--to connect him to Ellie (Joel is a fuckin middling Millennial but they keep writing him like a boomer. He's got a solid chance to be both queer and also cool about it. He is younger than Neil Druckmann it's just set in the future!!) This would make him think back to his relationship with Tess, his relationship to Sarah's mom, his relationship to relationships. His relationship to himself and his identity. (the themes of masculinity and queerness is one of the only good things I've heard about the show and they do it for Bill instead) His relationship to aging. A younger love interest would maybe continue themes of hope in those who will outlive you. An older love interest would tackle themes of maybe outliving someone else again, or already watching your partner succumb to aging, but also aging together in a world that kills people young inspires hopefulness. It would ALSO give him a character to connect to that isn't Ellie that begins to chip away at his isolation.

Then everything changed when the Firefly Nation attacked. Joel is injured and captured. I even had his leg get fucked so he's got no chance to escape--though I did not blow off his whole damn knee. He is taken far away and Ellie (and love interest at least) must go get him back. Through the attack, Ellie learns that Joel lied. It's important she doesn't learn it from him because then it's 1. something Joel is still forcing a secret 2. something for Ellie to be mad at Joel for. She's more angry he lied than what he lied about, but has room for both.

There were longstanding rumors that Joel dies in game 2 and I could make peace with that as long as it was cathartic and earned. While deciding whether to kill Joel in my own fic I settled on a crucial idea: Joel cannot die until the end if at all. If Ellie is motivated by a rescue then she is motivated by love. Getting him back. Reuniting. To SAVE him. If she is motivated by revenge, then it's a completely different story. Ellie is not *really* a vengeful person. Blind determination to save Joel is a much better drive for atrocity. So over the course of her roadtrip, she IS forced to do things she disagrees with in order to get Joel back, opening her up to the world Joel has been living in. It's not so easy to condemn him when she finds she'd actually do the same and is doing it. But it makes her come to forgive him, or at least understand him enough to release a grudge. With this love interest she would explore her OWN territorialness over Joel and also get to learn about a softer and more intimate side of Joel through this other person. Joel's greater capacity for gentleness and care and not just brute strength paternalistic protection. His capacity to grow beyond BOTH his trauma and his need to be a Dad.

At the end, I initially settled on Ellie saving Joel but I also toyed with the idea that he DOES die at the end. That during Joel's captivity he understands 1. how much Ellie would do for HIM, he is not the lone protector and that 2. Ellie is fine without him. This works whether he lives or dies. Lives and gets to get over himself and heal and make a life outside of his relationship to Ellie, or he dies while both characters get to have closure and come to understand that the trip was worth it so Joel could know he was loved, and that Joel could let go and die peacefully, knowing Ellie isn't fucked without him.

This is a googoogaga baby level of character analysis, pretty simple themes that are in line with who the characters are from the beginning, and you know who did this story really well? Dishonored 2.

The fact that this like cookie cutter story I came up with ended up being more true to the characters than what actually came out of TLOU2 is something I still reel over 6 years later.

I've written over and over about my disdain for the second game, the disgusting politics that seeped out that apparently were there since the beginning and that it was only through a lack of total creative control that this first game became a masterpiece.

But it's wild to me that like...I wrote a better TLOU2 thinking they wouldnt settle for something so simple and somehow they failed to HIT that low bar.

Here I was thinking that this sort of catharsis was a bit cliche but god what a breath of fresh air it would have been next to such nihilistic conservative drivel slapped with some pinkwashing overcoat.

You'd still get your road trip, you can still kill Joel, and you could make Abby a character to struggle to root against the same way Dishonored 2 did with Delilah where she 1. didn't immediately cross any horrific lines that alienated the audience from her 2. she had more motivation than simple revenge and 3. her humanization was really done well that you felt truly terrible for her. My captor was going to WRESTLE with what to do. Ultimately their choice to forgive or not forgive Joel was an arc that didn't hinge on his death.

It's so sad that a game that made me feel such pain for random dead bodies in a sewer in the first game just through notes you could find and things you could interact with couldn't make PLAYABLE plot-driving protagonists in the second game appeal to me organically without smacking me in the face and going "see? it's the exact same as Joel and Ellie if you remove the substance entirely."

Insane. Maybe one day I will write the story I thought they were going to write, but the games have become such a deeply sore spot in the last 6 years that I don't really want to make things for it anymore.

And also play Dishonored 2 because at its worst it crushed the exact same story that TLOU2 tried to do, even also with a queer daughter protag, and explored greater themes of identity and politics than TLOU2 could have dreamed of.

[brucefromfamilyguy]

[sawed-on-shotgun]

unfortunate truth of reality is that oftentimes 15 year olds will say/do/believe some stupid bullshit because they are 15 but telling them that they believe that because they are 15 is probably the most counterproductive thing in the entire universe

[ourdarling]

insane shit happening over on uquiz right now

[sawed-on-shotgun]

call me an annoying killjoy but i dont think its funny to generalize and make fun of any minority. including trans men. in fact i think its transphobic and bigoted to make fun of the existence of trans men and their desire to be respected and wouldnt fly with literally any other group of people

[mortalityplays]

hi, a lot of you need a perspective reset

the average human lifespan globally is 70+ years

taking the threshold of adulthood as 18, you are likely to spend at least 52 years as a fully grown adult

at the age of 30 you have lived less than one quarter of your adult life (12/52 years)

'middle age' is typically considered to be between 45-65

it is extremely common to switch careers, start new relationships, emigrate, go to college for the first or second time, or make other life-changing decisions in middle age

it's wild that I even have to spell it out, but older adults (60+) still have social lives and hobbies and interests.

you can still date when you get old. you can still fuck. you can still learn new skills, be fashionable, be competitive. you can still gossip, you can still travel, you can still read. you can still transition. you can still come out.

young doesn't mean peaked. you're inexperienced in your 20s! you're still learning and practicing! you're developing social skills and muscle memory that will last decades!

there are a million things to do in the world, and they don't vanish overnight because an imaginary number gets too big

[damejoansutherland]

side benefit of communal all-gender restrooms is that they may be our best chance to shame cis men into washing their hands

[damejoansutherland]

i was in a communal all-gender restroom today and as i was washing my hands a middle-aged man came out of one of the stalls, started to make for the door, clocked me standing at the sinks, and changed course to wash his hands with a real hangdog look on his face

[a-book-dragon]

You don't have a male or female brain – the more brains scientists study, the weaker the evidence for sex differences

Rather than distinctly male or female, the human brain is much more like the heart, kidneys and lungs – basically the same no matter the sex of the body it's in.

rb to make a biological essentialist mad <3

[liminalweirdo]

“This collapse is a telltale sign of a problem known as publication bias. Small, early studies which found a significant sex difference were likelier to get published than research finding no male-female brain difference.”

[mckitterick]

the notes on this are toxic - to help clear up any misunderstanding, here’s the actual science paper:

Dump the “dimorphism”: Comprehensive synthesis of human brain studies reveals few male-female differences beyond size

With the explosion of neuroimaging, differences between male and female brains have been exhaustively analyzed. Here we synthesize three dec

in short: brains are brains

[reasonsforhope]

Putting this on my good news blog, because yeah, you know what?

Proof that sexism, transphobia, and bioessentialism are biologically incorrect is absolutely a reason for hope - for society and for the world

[cock-holliday]

twenty questions for fanfic writers

Thank you, @randomfoggytiger for the tag!

1. How many works do you have on AO3? Just now 28. I was very slow to migrate to AO3 from FF.net

2. What's your total AO3 word count? 265,185 and when this new fic is fully up it'll be about 321,867 (56k+ on current edit)

3. What fandoms do you write for? I made the move to AO3 for Person of Interest since the fandom was really quite dead on ff. But since then it was mostly X-Files, but I have since surpassed my xfiles with Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, and now Dead by Daylight. Some minor counts also go to Critical Role, Cyberpunk2077, Subnautica, and even a Conclave fic for a friend.

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos? Lay Low, Take Care (person of interest--oldest fic on the account), Bait & Switch (x-files bodyswap fic. probs my most known one in the fandom) Bread is Stored In The Love Aisle (lil xfiles fic), Bottom of the Deep Blue Sea (cyberpunk2077 thriller) and Jinx (another fluffy xfiles)

5. Do you respond to comments? Yes, I do. Slowly but I tend to. I really appreciate when people take the time to write something in response. Wholeheartedly recommend replying to art comments, it might get you a wife....

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending? For sure A Heavy Sort of Absence. It's season 8 MSR separation fic for xfiles. I love angst, I love the drama, love when characters really really go through it, but I don't really like angsty endings. Even endings with death or tragedy need to be cathartic for me.

7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending? Hard to tell. Like I said I tend to do hopeful endings. The fic I just finished now has a particularly hopeful ending.

8. Do you get hate on fics? Not really. I don't think I've gotten anything really negative besides spam. The "meanest" comment I ever got once was on ff.net and it was someone angry that I made everyone "too gay"

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind? I do. Dunno what is meant by what kind. Canon, noncanon, I don't tend to do porn with no plot but there's definitely porn with only mild plot. I feel about smut that I do about fluff though, where there needs (for me) to be substance to it. Emotional or other catharsis. Payoff to tension. Bittersweet due to angst. For me, I need all story elements to feel connected. I don't think sex scenes are any less connected to plot than anything else but I want it to feel like an organic part of the story. Explicit or implied? Both are fine and I think depend on either the goals of what that scene means or how indulgent the scene is gonna be.

10. Do you write crossovers? What’s the craziest one you’ve written? I do but not often. That being said, my most recent fic is for a not-terribly-popular ship from Dead By Daylight (a game with limited story) and is crossed over with Subnautica that is, despite my love for it, not exactly a AAA game. It has the same sort of anti-capitalist scifi horror potential as the Alien universe but with deep sea more than deep space. THAT game's lore is both very expansive and also mostly implied. It leaves a lot of room for speculation and made a really good universe to set two people who have a lot of experience with being in the torture labyrinth. Cough YuiNea shippers where yall at?

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen? I sure hope not

12. Have you ever had a fic translated? Not that I know of

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before? Not really, but my wonderful partner has been getting early-access reads and giving really great feedback, so a lot of important improvements are because of her, my editor

14. What’s your all time favorite ship? I don't know that I could possibly narrow it down but my current favorite ship is Yui Kimura/Nea Karlsson from Dead by Daylight so you should definitely get invested and help make things for the ship so this little fandom doesn't starve, thank you.

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will? I wrote the entire outline but never finished writing a Last of Us fic on ff. Back in 2017-2018 teasers were coming out about TLOU2 and there was heavy speculation that this new tough woman character was Ellie's mom. The devs leaned into teasing this. This, mixed with concepts of hate and love being core themes had me convinced the story would reveal that Ellie's mom *was* still alive--shedding light on her backstory and really getting you to connect with this character (another parent of Ellie's) and THEN getting into concepts of family, especially if Ellie's mother has a dark past too. Who is her "real family"? The woman Ellie is related to by birth or the person she has grown closest to? They could tackle some really interesting themes and I was super excited for this potentially gripping story about choice and chosen family and autonomy and didn't want to step on their toes, so I wrote a fairly shallow parallel plot instead for a "last of us 2" where the consequences of Joel's actions catch up to him, he's injured and captured, and Ellie must travel far to get him back. Which is...somehow both the same and better than what tlou2 ended up being. I gave the characters time to recover from game 1, connected Joel to people, connected Ellie to people in the town (which game 2 at least did) and had Ellie travel with someone and ultimately over the course of trying to save Joel, find that she's also forced to do things she disagrees with, but it's Joel, so she will, and through this experience comes to understand what he did and forgive him. When rumors came out that he died, I thought how cathartic his death could be as long as Ellie finds she really is her own person without him. LOL I don't think I'll ever finish writing it because that's extremely close to what the game ended up being, and despite timestamps of my work from 2+ years before the game came out, I don't want to just finish a story that would have "fixed" elements of the game I came to hate. Maybe one day I'll write what I thought (aka plot with Ellie's mom) they were going to write, but we'll see.

16. What are your writing strengths? Something I get complimented on, which is the thing I am most proud of, is character study. I got into fanfic writing because of wanting to deeply understand character motivation and voice. Even in AU's or fixits or anything else where the circumstances are entirely different, I want the character to be consistent. I spend a lot of time, in fic and oc writing, really really finding who the person is in order to portray them accurately. I feel about my writing how I feel as a reader or viewer, that the plot can be preposterous as long as the characters are rich. If I am not invested in the people, the most interesting set pieces will fall flat for me.

17. What are your writing weaknesses? I think my biggest weakness is that I struggle with keeping stories short and if the time and energy and motivation isn't there, I might burn out before I finish. A short story concept or single scene blossoms into a 50k+ idea and sometimes I do not finish. I've gotten much better at writing all or most of a fic before I begin publishing because I like to be able to better control release of chapters and also use engagement as motivation to finish. Getting hype on chapters 1-3 when I'm struggling to finish chapter 20 can sometimes be the push I need. Fictober challenges for xfiles fandom in the early 2020s was also a great exercise in forcing myself to drabble or even write fluff, because every idea does not have to be a novella but I'm bad at conceding to that. As you may have guessed, brevity is not one of my best skills.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic? I have done it a good bit, but try to use it sparingly. As I've been learning other languages myself, I like to reflect my language learning struggles in other characters. I never want language to be a barrier for readers, so I either tend to imply another language is spoken (one the other characters understand) rather than write in that language, use words or phrases here and there, or use it more as something people can either look up or have explained to them later. Terms of endearment, curses, expressions, a character forgetting a word in English, etc. But never full strings of dialogue I would either have to parallel translate or leave the reader to have to go look up entirely on their own.

19. First fandom you wrote for? HP, unfortunately. I had become very invested in a side couple because I, at the time, didn't care for romance in my fiction but was obsessed with both characters in the pair, so these dumb books actually did convince me to like shipping. Then my pair was unceremoniously killed off in the last book as a poor parallel to the protag's dead parents. Feeling dissatisfied at the end of the series I discovered fanfic for the first time and was blown away by someone who wrote stories from books 3 to 7 from these characters' perspectives which filled gaps, gave better motivation for action, and slow-burned better than plenty of things I've read since. It convinced me to try to write my own, filling in even more gaps this author didn't get into. I wrote original stories before, and loved storytelling since I could talk, but this was my first time doing fan-fiction. JKR is responsible for a lot of misery but I suppose I owe her for leaving me disappointed at 13 years old and sparking me to do something about it.

20. Favorite fic you’ve written? That's really tough. I'm quite proud of my most recent, I'm very proud of another DBD fic that helped to develop some very flat characters, I'm very proud of Bait & Switch, and this fic is very responsible for my relationship with my partner. I also have a person of interest fic on ff not AO3 which is definitely not my best work, but was written in 2012 during the summer hiatus between the first and second season. I made guesses about how the cliffhanger would resolve, dove into the characters including a newly revealed villain and had to decide how this character would function with very little to go off of. When the next season premiered I was *very close* on a lot of my guesses, had a scene almost exactly the same as what played in the show, and immediately forced people to read my work because of how well it meshed with what happened. I later submitted the fic as a screenplay (along with the original fic format) as part of my portfolio to go to film school. Person of Interest fanfiction got me a scholarship so don't let anyone tell you fanfic isn't a good skill to have. LOL

I know so few fic writers on here these days, especially ones who aren't already in this tag circle due to xfiles. Any fic writers who want to do this ask, please do, and you can say I tagged ya

[radioactive-yuri]

im so fucking tired of "transmasc is when afab trans and transfem is when amab trans" IM NOTTT TRANSMASC AND IF YOU REFER TO ME AS SUCH I WILL CONSIDER IT MISGENDERING. STOP THINKING IN BINARIES. STOP THINKING IN THE FALSE BOY-MASC-FEM-GIRL SPECTRUM. MASC MEANS MASCULINE. FEM MEANS FEMININE. I AM NEITHER. I AM ANDROGYNOUS. I AM NONBINARY. NOT MASC-LITE. CAN YOU FUCKING STOP

[ipostradicalfeminismisntrad]

[greelin]

in case you needed to hear it today:

it’s okay to use your turn signal when you’re changing lanes

it’s okay to use your turn signal when you’re taking an exit

it’s okay to use your turn signal when you plan on turning (can even be done sooner than 2 seconds before you’re about to turn)

you have a turn signal. in your vehicle. two of them in fact.

you are so brave and beautiful and smart and can do it. using your turn signal