and in response to Andy Serkis' "all white shire" comment, i'm going to quote Tolkien himself:
"But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White."
TLDR: you can’t value the potentially troublesome and/or racist beliefs of ONE dead person more than ALL your fellow human beings. If given a chance to CHOOSE to include people who have historically been pushed to the sidelines for racist reasons and upholding a racist ideal of an idyllic whites own paradise you should choose inclusion over exclusion
At this point I want to scream at people that we don’t HAVE to be faithful to the horrible beliefs of our predecessors. Like even IF Serkis was right (and he’s not) WE can choose to NOT repeat the mistakes of the past.
Tolkien wasn’t perfect and there is racism and bigotry in his works AND there was also a lot of anti-bigotry in his works but we’re not bound to the perspective of one man. We can choose to pick up where he left off and further correct the harmful tropes and inherent biases in his books.
No matter what Tolkien intended, Middle-Earth belongs to everyone and is home to everyone and we can choose to reflect the beauty of our diverse world by welcoming EVERYONE into our own interpretations and reimagings of Tolkien’s world.
When WE create something (even if it’s a reinterpretation or built off of someone else’s work) WE get to choose what values we want to imbue that work with. If we truly believe in antiracism and fighting against white supremacy, racism, fascism, etc. then we must actively choose to include the voices of people who historically have been pushed out for racist reasons.
By actively choosing to hide behind this weird logic that Tolkien wanted a pure whites only Shire so we just CANT cast people of color as hobbits, you are actively choosing to uphold the white supremacist and racist thoughts that are harming the world today. Then you’re using the dead professor as your shield to retain the goodwill of people willing to give you the benefit of a doubt (or who just don’t care). It’s insidious and a great way to cover your own troublesome beliefs. Additionally it creates this mental wall where you don’t have to question your own inherent biases.
Also, even IF that was truly Tolkien’s intention (which it wasn’t) WHY would you want to uphold that intention of all intentions? Why wouldn’t you want to dismantle that disgusting idea as soon as possible? You can love Tolkien and his world and also say you know what that’s a fucked up idea. Let’s not do that. Or yeah no professor that’s your bigotry/racism/biases popping up and I’m not going to tolerate that
There is this weird tension between remaining faithful to a book/comic and acknowledging that the mere act of adapting a work requires you to take someone else’s work and make it your own and by doing so YOU are actively choosing what to retain and what to reimagine. Your adaptation will NEVER be the book because the book is the book and your adaptation is YOUR take on the book. You, ultimately, are responsible for what is included and what isn’t and what you, either subconsciously or consciously, add to the adaptation.
Finally England/Europe has always had POC!!!! So this entire conversation is bullshit. Include BIPOC in your projects people!!!
I feel like pointing out Tolkien did explicitly state that one of the three groups that originally founded the shire had brown skin, just for the people who don’t know why Serkis is completely full of shit. Also, two out of three of the houses of the Edain were described as racially diverse, and the elves and dwarves skin colour was never mentioned at all.
I know this addition is sorta undermining the posts point a bit, but I figured someone reading this might want to know why people who make these claims are just being racist; people like Serkis are actively ignoring the text in order to push a white supremacist agenda. I’m just so tired of all this “whites only middle-earth” nonsense.
please wear sunscreen!!! I've seen "fuck the beauty industrial complex" posts about complicated skincare regimens and am 100% with them except sometimes they mention sunscreen and no. no. absolutely not. sunscreen is a wonderful supportive friend who wants to keep you safe, and you should let her do it. throw out all your other cosmetics and skincare products if you want, but keep your sunscreen. and if you're not wearing sunscreen, start wearing it!!!! this is not about terror of aging, this is not about every tiny imperfection our fucked-up culture has made you feel insecure about, this is about protecting yourself from skin cancer. wear the damn sunscreen.
& honestly there's no debate to be had the zendaya earrings are orders of magnitude worse than kim kardashian wearing that marilyn dress. yes that piece was a one of a kind unique textile made so specifically for marilyn monroe she had to be sewn into it. at the end of the day it was a ~70 year old usamerican cultural artefact being repurposed by an american for an american cultural event and everyone involved knows exactly where the dress came from + what happened to it + where it went afterwards. zendaya is wearing the looted (or forged) cultural heritage of a people her government is currently bombing & whose lives they have been deliberately making unliveable for decades to a movie premiere that has fuck all to do with iran. we don't know where those discs came from where they were found or by whom & we never will. AND the jeweller appears to have altered them substantially from their original condition. destroying a people's cultural heritage at the same time you destroy their country + their lives so you can look good on a red carpet One Time i want to fucking hurl
The earrings, worn by Zendaya at The Odyssey press tour, are believed to be 2,000-3,000 years old and come at a time when the US is bombing
An archaeologist quoted in the article says "the point of these earrings is not to showcase legitimate ancient artistry, it is to fetishize the past, to be a commodity, stolen from the elite, circulated illegally, and immorally…this is about class signalling."
>a wild therapist has entered the chat
you need an additional coping mechanism
studying the blade is a DBT principle called Building Mastery - wherein you engage in anything that is practical during which you gain skill and can actively see yourself progress - which is resilience building technique by which you shore yourself against vulnerability factors that make it harder to regulate emotions and manage activities of daily life and interpersonal interactions effectively. if you continue to study the blade while engaging in therapy, it will in fact make your therapeutic session more effective because having a skill that you pursue builds self-esteem and is a foundation upon which other coping skills can be built.
so not better coping skills, blademaster, additional ones.
you are already heading in the right direction and you have proven you have the tenacity to apply yourself to one discipline. now show us what you can do when applying yourself to your healing.
If you need perspective of how much space the Bison needs to feel comfortable... Imagine for a moment that you are a cow, and on the other side of the intervening distance are wolves. As a cow, are you comfortable with the amount of space you have until wolves?
Humans are scary animals, even if you think you look harmless, to wildlife you don't and that is how it should be.
Just to let everyone know-according to the people there this guy was the correct distance away. There was a truck that passed by that honked and pissed off the bison, and the bison took it out on the guy-probably because it thought he made the noise.
It's the rare instance of 'no, this visitor was actually doing everything right; some jackass in a truck that pissed off the bison is at fault.'
What started as a yearly trip for a grandfather and his grandson turned into a visit to a Montana hospital after a bison attack at Yellowsto
What started as a yearly trip for a grandfather and his grandson turned into a visit to a Montana hospital after a bison attack at Yellowstone National Park.
Carl McDaniel, 65, was hospitalized with a broken femur after a bison charged and tossed him into the air Friday evening at the park’s Bridge Bay Campground, according to McDaniel and the National Park Service.
He was visiting the park with his 13-year-old grandson when they decided to take a walk after dinner.
Along the way, they encountered a large bison that appeared to be rolling around in the dust and was not bothering anyone, McDaniel told CNN.
“We were about a hundred yards away,” McDaniel said. “He was not aggressive; he was not having problems and we took some pictures and decided to walk on.”
McDaniel and his grandson snapped a quick photo and continued with their walk, video of the encounter shows. At the same time, a truck drove by, and the driver laid on his horn in what appeared to be an attempt to get the bison to move, McDaniel said. There is no audio on the video.
The bison then appeared to become agitated and began running toward the pair.
“There was little time to decide what to do. At that point, he was within 100 yards; he could be to us in seconds, so I told my grandson to run in one direction and I went the other to try and draw him away,” McDaniel said.
The animal then pushed McDaniel with the top of its head, sending him flying into the air before he hit the ground, the grandfather said.
“When I was on the ground immobile, unable to move, he was right on top of me. He could have stomped on me, he could have gored me, he could have done almost anything to take my life, and he did not do so,” McDaniel said.
After McDaniel hit the ground, photographer Mike MacLeod, who captured the encounter on video, had to step in, he told Cowboy State Daily.
“I was really afraid he was going to gore the guy on the ground, so I stopped videotaping and ran at the bison, yelled loud, and was trying to be as big and intimidating as possible,” MacLeod said.
After the bison took off, people rushed over to McDaniel, who was in a lot of pain, MacLeod told Cowboy State Daily. Yellowstone EMS arrived soon after, he said.
“Park emergency medical personnel responded and transported him to a nearby hospital,” the National Park Service said in confirming the incident in a statement to CNN.
This is the second bison attack at Yellowstone this year. A 12-year-old was injured near Mud Volcano on June 26, according to the agency.
After Friday’s attack, “all the people that were there were amazing; they were all positive, they were trying to help as best they could,” McDaniel said. A nurse started tending to his leg, while another bystander held his head.
He was then transferred to a hospital in Bozeman, a two-hour journey during which he was in intense pain. He said he was grateful for the paramedic who helped him along the way.
McDaniel broke his femur, the body’s strongest bone, in four places near his hip and suffered several bruises. He had surgery Sunday and could stand by Monday.
“I will be doing physical therapy for the next few days to get to walk, but it was not as catastrophic as it could have been,” McDaniel said.
The National Park Service advises visitors to stay at least 25 yards away from bison at all times and to never approach the animals. “If the bison follows you, spray bear spray as you are moving away, and seek cover behind nearby trees or cars,” the agency said.
i like "social ergonomics" bc like yeah. furniture is usually made in a way that's like "we think this is probably what is needed for a human to immediately perform any given task" and often we are wrong about what types of furniture or spaces will have a detrimental long term impact on our bodies. ergonomics ideally looks at the evidence of the impact on bodies and then works backwards from there to come up with design.
social ergonomics should mean looking at social structures and analyzing the outcomes they have re: human welfare, and then taking that information back to the design board and redesigning things to hurt people less.
this should also be a zine. someday. but that would require me being able to sit upright
My partner is a game designer. He crafts experiences intended to elicit specific behaviors from thousands of strangers as his full time job. He often looks at social structures from this perspective in his free time and we talk about it a lot. and hoo boy are a lot of our systems not doing what they are officially meant to do.
if you’re genuinely interested in game design you should check out Radiator Yang’s game The Tearoom (NSFW, unless you work at the Sucking Off Dude’s Guns factory).
I realize it’s weird to show up on someone’s post to say “you like game design. Have you played this game about giving head in a bathroom?” but it’s a really thoughtfully made game (see the artist’s statement, which is also NSFW) that is also about the effects of surveillance on communities. when, after about half an hour of play, I realized what mindset the game had deliberately cultivated in me, I had to turn off my computer and stare at the ceiling for ten minutes. and that’s Game Design, to me
[Image ID: A tweet by @/nobodymovepal reading "the ideal fandom experience is 1 irl friend, 10-15 mutuals, 5 amusing strangers you're trying to impress with the whimsical bells on your jaunty court jester's outfit, & 2 artists who do not speak your language but will be making niche fanart for the next 35 years." End Quote.
We're at the "JK Rowling is personally funding litigation to try and destroy AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL" stage of rabid UK terf brain.
Screenshot via Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net on bluesky
Tldr Amnesty International, global human rights organisation, published a report called 'A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK'. In it is detailed, amongst others, a whole bunch of transphobic groups and organisations, including Beira's Place, JK Rowling's trans exclusionary sexual violence support service. JK Rowling threw a shit fit and got Amnesty to take the report down by threatening libel. This was obviously not enough, because you can't appease a fascist, so now she's going to bankroll a bunch of lawsuits anyway through the JK Rowling Women's Fund.*
You can read an archived version of the report here, please save it and share it.
*Not so friendly reminder there is no way to engage in the wizard books without enabling this shit.
It's hard to really get across how baffling the gatekeeping model of trans healthcare actually is.
Like. You say "maybe patients shouldn't have to put their hand in the pain box from Dune" and people go "but we should be careful". Okay. The pain box from Dune is unrelated to being careful.
"So the pain box from Dune is expensive, has no demonstrable benefit to patients, many patients say the pain box was bad for them. We can remove the pain box at negative cost and it won't be missed."
"Have you considered that this radical activism is alienating moderate supporters?"
It's established that detransition is an unusual outcome, and the nationwide right-wing anti-trans detransitioner dragnet has established that the number of people who detransition and then go on to believe that transition should not be available is effectively zero. So we are talking about a fraction of the patient population "people who transition."
But the gatekeeping model isn't just not helpful to detransitioners. It isn't just ineffective in preventing detransition. It's counterproductive.
What's less traumatic? What's less frightening and humiliating? What's less likely to lead to despair in that small fraction of patients who decide they need to stop/go back?
Option A: "You can transition if you want. Try HRT and see if you like the effects. If you're not sure, you can try a lower dose and ramp up gradually. If you want to stop, you can stop at any time. Some effects will gradually reverse themselves as your body readjust. Some may be permanent. But either way, you'll be fine. We affirm your right to make all decisions related to your transition, and we trust you to protect your own emotional wellbeing throughout this process. We're here to support you."
Option B: "You're about to make irreversible changes to your body, so we need to make sure you're making the right decision. What if you're delusional? Or immature? Or just a pervert? What if you haven't fully considered the potentially catastrophic effects of transition? You know this is mutilation of a healthy body, right? So are you sure? Are you sure? Are you really really sure? You can never go back! Point of no return! Last chance! Final countdown!"
Like, the point of this is obviously not to protect the dignity and peace of some hypothetical patient who got all the way through transition and then is like oh oops.
If that were the case, the emphasis would be completely different. It would not be stuck on let's make sure you're not about to fuck your life all the way up.
If there were any empathy or actual concern, any intrerest in detransitioners or their actual relationship to this gatekeeping process, the problem with this approach would be immediately clear. The problem with treating patients like they're not competent would be clear.
The spectre of transition regret exists to torment trans people and justify external (cis) control of transition. It's brutal because it's intended to brutalize. It's meant to create learned helplessness through shame, to punish everyone who transitions for the sin of self-determination.
And that harms all transitioning patients, but to the extent that eventual detransitioners are within that group, it directly harms them as well. It makes them more psychologically vulnerable in the aftermath, and it makes it much harder for them to trust themselves as they navigate detransition. Informed consent / autonomy helps everyone.
I would actually make the argument that the heart of the problem here is not either about fans, as the article claims, or production companies being exploitative cowards, as some of the comments are claiming. The heart of the problem is the increasingly eroding privacy we are seeing in the modern age.
There's some people in the comments saying "fandoms have always been like this" and others saying "No, it's worse than it was." And both are to some extent right. Fans (or at least a small percentage of fans, and the larger a fanbase gets the larger a group this will describe) have always been Like That; but they did not always have the level of access to creators and actors that they have now.
The notion that a performer needs to be constantly available to public scrutiny, that their personal information should by default be available to any rando with google, is pretty new. It used to be that actors would only be expected to engage with the public on limited, specific, and controlled occasions, usually with security provided. Now they're being asked to rawdog exposure to the mob 24/7 on their own.
(Also, production companies have always always always been exploitative cowards, just to get that straight; reading the biographies of literally any actress from golden Hollywood years makes that clear. It's just, again, more public now.)
There has also been a negative feedback loop as fandoms come to realize that the constant access they have to creatives increases their leverage and power. It did not use to be the case that this was so; fandoms pre-internet largely worked under the assumption that they didn't really have any meaningful way to contact or influence the publication houses. Even if they sent a letter or a campaign of letters, they wouldn't even know whether the letters were being received or read unless the publishing house chose to respond. So, without that expectation of access, the drama usually stayed internal. Nowadays, with constant immediate feedback from creators and publishers, fans are ever more incentivized to act out to try to push an agenda, get attention, or just vent whatever is going on in their lives onto a face contractually obliged to be friendly to them.
"shipping and blorbofication are not inherently at odds with understanding a story's deep themes" and "some people can't grasp the themes of a story because they never learned how to engage with stories outside of the lens of shipping and blorbofication" are two statements that can coexist
blorbofication to me is when you love a character in such a laser focus way that you somewhat detach them from the narrative from which they are inserted and treat them in a way roughly similar to how you'd treat an oc for which you still have no story and just like to put them in situations just for fun. which there's nothing wrong with btw, it's just that it can easily lead to people forgetting the character engine in a narrative and not just a barbie doll
as an example of blorbofication taken to the extreme without the acknowledgement of the story context to ground it please refer to the thomas jefferson miku binder
I had a lot of/still have some vestigial arrogance about quantitative methods over qualitative ones, probably in a combination of scientific misogyny + STEMlord superiority. But doing regression analysis and quant-heavy data analysis makes me realise more and more that you can justify basically any claim with numbers, and that you can construct your research in such a way as to output the numbers you want. which does not mean that all data are made up or that quantitative knowledge is all false. I think stories about scientists straight up inventing numbers or fudging experiments on purpose prove that there is a real difference between fraudulent and non-fraudulent research. but those data must always be narrativised & are always already narrativised. The act of presenting numbers itself is doing some of that narration because you’re already arguing that these numbers are worth presenting
People in the notes are rightfully pointing out common issues with data manipulation and pre-loaded conclusions in scientific research (i.e., the academic version of asking "so, how often do you beat your wife?" and so on), but I should have clarified that I'm not really talking about that. I'm talking about completely legitimate, above-board scientific research.
For example, I've had students ask me (in good faith) how it was possible for international medical bodies to report different counts of COVID-19 cases during the early years of the pandemic. And one of the answers is that you need to first define what you mean by a "COVID-19 case." Do you include self-reported incidences? Waste water data? Geo-fenced social media posts about people complaining about their coronavirus symptoms? Federal estimates? Hospital data? How do you compare countries/territories/substate entities with mandatory reporting mechanisms vs countries/territories/substate entities that rely only on voluntary self-reported cases? And what combination of these do you use? How you construct what you mean by "case" is going to impact the outcomes you report. These different counts of COVID-19 cases can all be true simultaneously, not because numbers are made up, but because they all come out of different methodologies that can be equally valid.
And this is true across all science, not just social science. Bill Clinton said it best lol: "it depends on what your definition of the word 'is' is." This feels obvious when you look at scientific research that uses "skull measurements" as their object of analysis - the concept itself is white supremacist, regardless of how "sound" the research is. But even something as apparently self-evident as a COVID-19 case still requires a definition, and how you define your variables is necessarily going to impact how the research goes and what conclusions are drawn.
These definitions are always embedded in political & social assumptions. And again, this does not mean that science is all made up or nonsense or whatever. There is a widespread fetishism of "objective knowledge" that is itself ideological - the idea that knowledge can be divorced from all historical and political contexts, that you can scrub bias from research and simply report the facts. Valuable, well-supported, well-constructed scientific research is always embedded in these contexts. Not just as a result of researcher assumptions, but of the material context it exists in - what research resources are available, how & what research gets funded, the academy's relationship to the state & non-government bodies that both provide data and use that research to inform policy, the historical relationships universities often have with settler-colonialism and imperialism that give them access to "foreign" research subjects, etc etc etc.
So my overall point (which I didn't communicate well) is that data can always say what you want to some extent, for good and for ill. And research results (at least in my experience) tend to surprise you in ways that require explanations, which themselves can be fully justified, but again, exist within many different contexts that influence how you interpret them - and not just the results themselves, but your own surprise at your results
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