welcome to our personal blog for storing random queer bullshit. Our names are Human (it/its/how dare you perceive me) and Demon (He/Him or it/its), quite frankly we aren't used to anyone referring to us at all lol - this is a side blog, main/art is hellispeacefullandempty Fandom/writing is redhoodinternaldialectical Horny is fangs-claws-and-terrible-ideas
to those of you who need to hear this: there are absolutely surgeries that give you both a penis and vagina at the same time, they're called salmacian surgeries! look them up!
I told someone these existed and they told me that was exactly what they wanted, but they'd been afraid to look it up for fear of how devastating it would be to find out there's no such thing. well there is! which means we need to start handing out flyers and running ads
Rewatching Truman Show for the first time in a long time, and the detail that’s stuck with me this time is the set design.
The characters drive modern cars and hock modern products, but it’s all presented with a veneer of 1950s wholesome applecheeked Americana. Truman’s life is presented as an escape for the audience from the drudgery of the modern day, and the aesthetic they’ve chosen for this is the post-war economic boom. This is the simple time, the movie says. This is the good time. Doesn’t the modern day suck? Let’s go back and see our friends from the days when life was good.
And it’s a lie. Truman’s life is a lie, and the image of white picket fenced suburbia they’ve presented is a lie. It’s an elaborate construction to recreate a false memory that’s comfortable for advertisers. The movie is a satire, but it’s also a very blatant statement against the nostalgia for a golden age which never existed. It’s a lie. It doesn’t exist.
I don’t know. I’m spitballing. I’m biased because I despise mid-20th century Americana and I naturally treat it with hostility, but it’s very gratifying to see a movie kind of agree with me.
Earlier in the summer, I went to Florida with my friend. We decided to visit a town nearish to where we were staying called Seaside, as we had heard it was a cute place. What I did not know at the time was that Seaside is the place where they filmed The Truman Show. It was a "master-planned community," constructed in the 80s to be the perfect beach town.
Seaside, FL
Seahaven
And yes, it really does look Like That. Not just in their tourist-agency photos, in real life it looks like that. Arguably the irl Seaside is even prettier than movie Seahaven, because the the office buildings where Truman works don't exist; the town is 100% cutesy homes and little shops.
Every single house is pastel with white trim and a white picket fence with the family's name on it in a handwritten font. The streets are paved with red bricks and lined with palmettos, and families bicycle past. The streets are clean, the lawns manicured, the sidewalks pristine.
Soon after we arrive my friend says as we walk, "God I wish I could live in a place like this. Imagine having the money to live in a place like this." I reply, "I don't actually know for me...it's gorgeous don't get me wrong, but there's no grime, you know? Where's the grime? I'd feel uncomfortable. It feels like there's not a dive bar for a hundred miles."
We reach the town center, which is a wide square lined with shops on one side, food trucks on the other. We have a lovely time looking through the shops, though I start feeling kinda weird, and I'm not sure why. Probably the extreme cleanliness of the area is making me feel off-kilter. And the surreal feeling of walking through areas I recognize from The Truman Show only adds to the weirdness.
We go into a clothing store, and it's crowded with people who appear to have stepped out of a Land's End catalog. It sells boring tshirts, shorts, and sundresses in whites and blues, all needlessly expensive. Employees walk through, refolding already-pristine shirts. So perfect. "Anyone buying from here is so rich they can probably smell the poor on us," my friend jokes, "that's why they have so many employees refolding things, it's to fix anything we brush against." "Or even breathe on!" I add.
We continue on to the grocery store where, in the movie, Truman finds Marlon stocking the vending machine and first tells him he suspects his world is wrong. I buy some pasta salad there to eat for lunch (all the cafes are quite expensive), and we find a place to sit and eat. As my friend finishes up her food, I write a postcard to my sister, telling her about my trip overall and my day in Seaside, describing the town as 'vomit-inducingly picturesque.' (It has been weeks since my visit and she still has not received that postcard)
Lunch done, we decide to walk down to the beach and have a swim. And I realize something about the surreal feeling. "Weird question," I say to my friend, "have you seen any non-white people here? Am I imagining that?"
She pauses. "The lady cleaning the bathrooms?" she asks.
"No I mean vacationers. Guests, customers. Other than you, I haven't seen a single one who wasn't white."
"...No. I haven't either."
And now that we see it, we can't unsee it. It's a wealthy area, so I had been expecting it to be pretty white, but the fact that there is not a single nonwhite person who isn't working a service job feels so gross. It's as though the place is somehow still segregated, like we have stepped back in time, but not to the fun, fake, rock-n-roll-and-soda-parlor-nostalgia version of the fifties, but to the real racism-and-repression fifties.
It is so fucking weird and sinister. I feel I have stumbled into another realm. All these people giving us sideeye, riding around on their golf carts in their pristine $45 seaside-branded tshirts, taking pictures of the perfect houses all lined up in perfect rows. A whole town of Meryls wearing lulu lemon.
We walk on. It's hot, and a swim is exactly what we need. Surely they can't ruin the ocean. I myself am extremely excited to swim, because now that we've spent a few hours among the pompous populace, I want to piss in their perfect ocean more than anything in the world.
We walk along behind the beachfront bar patios that line the beach toward the access point, and the ocean looks so blue and inviting. Although the hedge growing between us and the dunes is strangely tall. "Huh," I think. "It's weird that they'd grow it like this, it blocks the view for everyone sitting on the patios."
We arrive at the boardwalk, and there is a man standing there. He says "Hold on! Do you two have a beach access pass?" I look at him in disbelief. It's a public beach, but the sign behind the man says you have to rent a beach chair to use the beach, and it's $35 per person. We glance at each other, turn wordlessly, and head back to town.
I seriously consider trying to sneak onto the beach somehow, because at this point I am very invested in the idea of pissing in their ocean, but I realize that with the tall hedge it would be nigh-impossible.
We went home after that.
So many reviews for Seaside on travel websites mention how they love to visit Seaside because they feel transported, they feel it reflects a "simpler time" or a "peaceful life." It's been weeks and I can't stop thinking about my experience. It really drove home how...complicit people can be in their own ignorance. A lot of people want to live in that perfect bubble, and especially if they have the money, they can maintain that barrier. It reminds me that part of the reason I often have trouble persuading these types of people is because they simply do not want to be persuaded. They're so proud to be the place where The Truman Show was filmed, but I rather doubt they really think about what it means that they live on a movie set, in a surreal dream.
Honestly visiting Seaside was a 10/10 unique experience. I would highly recommend it as a place to go for a couple hours if you're gonna be nearby and want to feel like you've been kidnapped into The Truman Show and/or your brain has been put in an easy bake oven. It's like a zoo for superrich WASPS. We had a really good time loudly making fun of how insane it all was, invading their little paradise with our riffraff energy. Treat it like an excursion into the jungle; you're gonna have to park a half mile away minimum, and bring all your food and water with you so you don't have to buy anything. You don't want to give them any money. They have enough.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, next time I go to the panhandle, I will be going to the nearest free public beach access to Seaside, and I will walk to the Seaside area of the beach, and I will piss in their ocean.
so. i just learned that my entirely me-written resume flags as being AI-written by automated HR systems for a few writing quirks and the fact that i followed all the rules of good resume writing, which is apparently a telltale sign of AI use in this fucking hellworld. i've been desperately applying to jobs that i am massively overqualified for for months with no response, not even an interview, and now i find out that at least part of the reason is because some fucking moron decided that following the rules every career advisor has given me for a decade means i cheated and should be disqualified. the ai bubble cannot pop soon enough. what the actual fuck.
"frequent use of action-result sentences. bullet points all start with action verbs. no career gaps." girl what the fuck are you talking about. that's just resume writing advice being followed. i just did what i was told. it's a fucking resume. you're supposed to do all that stuff. what the fuck do you mean it looks ai generated and wouldn't pass basic detection systems?????????? for following the resume writing rules????????????
It can be easy to confuse the two, but you don't actually "wish you were more disabled", you wish your disability was taken seriously and was properly accommodated and that you had access to the support and resources you need - and that desire is so valid. You deserve more. But the sad truth is that no level of disability actually guarantees a sufficient level of support. So you have to work to separate your very understandable desire for more support from the incorrect assumption that other disabled people are consistently receiving what you aren't. All of us are getting fucked over in this society, and no group of disabled people actually has it easy.
So every year, my aquarium does a captive lobster hatchery project (hence all the loblings). The reason we’re doing it is because in the wild, loblings only have a 1 in 25,000 chance of surviving their larval phase. They’re plankton as babies and everything eats them. Additionally, as the Gulf of Maine warms, they are having even lower survival rates because the blooms of copepods they feed on as babies are happening earlier in the year, and they’re missing it.
Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.
The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).
The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.
But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.
You're not really supposed to say it this way, because its considered crass, but here in the US children are culturally and legally considered essentially the property of their parents.
Note that its considered more crass to point this out than it is to treat children as property in the first place.
Some people in asylums in the 50s were crazy. Some of them were psychotic, screaming at things nobody else could see. Some of them were aggressive, kicking and punching and biting without provocation. Some of them were a danger to themselves. Hell, some of them were a danger to others. And they were people. They were human beings. And all human beings deserve human rights, something those people, by law, didn't have.
Some people in mental hospitals now are crazy. Some of us are psychotic. Some of us are aggressive. Some of us are a danger to ourselves. Some of us are a danger to others. And we are still humans, who deserve human rights, which we legally do not have.
Some of us, a few of the crazy people you talk about, are exactly what you say we are. Psychotic, aggressive, a danger to ourselves and others. That doesnt change the fact that we are human. That doesnt change the fact that every individual human that exists, has ever existed, and will ever exist deserves human rights. That doesnt change the fact that we don't have those human rights in every situation. "Few of us are aggressive," while true as a statement, fails to acknowledge and insist that those of us who are still deserve to be treated with the same dignity and respect as any other person.
Happy that people are smashing flock cameras i just hope it doesn’t stop there and people put up the same resistance when they try to regulate it into safety features
Fancy smart cars track you. Pings to satellites for gps. Your paired smartphone streaming music
In the usa backup cameras have been required on all new vehicles starting in 2012. More and more features require internet to work, including potentially life saving services. Can the driver call 911? Can the car alert medics to your location? If the driver needs help what should the vehicle do?
It’s easy to see how ‘always available 911 service’ or ‘automatic crash detection with location’ could be argued as mandatory safety features. Even gps could become required
The reason Flock cameras became a flashpoint is because they are vocal about being a third party selling your location, and they are building easy to search collections of data. Could a subpoena surface cell phone pings and a spotty web of cameras to general show where you drove? Yes, but that takes effort and a legal paper trail. This is a net catching all who pass, allowing the data to build patterns, where the patterns become the source of legal action, instead of searching for information relating an existing legal matter
Flock cameras are uniquely bad, but are just a single star in a horrible constellation of data mining
Panetta argued—in a probably conscious paraphrase of Anne-Marie Slaughter—that “girls don’t have to change who they are” to become arms dealers and military officers. Rather, the war machine must change for us. And which female “us” is that? The writer and journalist Rania Khalek once sardonically declared that, in American geopolitics, “all that actually matters is breaking glass ceilings, even if that means breaking the actual ceilings of women in Yemen.”
Real events bore out Khalek’s observation with spine-tingling crudeness when, in 2019, the weapons manufacturer Raytheon (responsible for many lethal drone bombings of Yemenis) wrote a check to the Girl Scouts of the USA, after which the two organizations cosponsored a series of “Cyber Challenges” themed around juvenile females’ career advancement. Smiling cadettes learned code and received “mentorship,” all courtesy of the “defense” megalith that ongoingly profits from selling bombs to Saudi Arabia, which end up obliterating Yemeni school buses.
"rickrolling is mean" rickrolling is the gentle, kind, prosocial descendant of what we used to do on the internet, which was putting a redirect to goatse in every possible misspelling of a url
Totally normal for a legitimate for-profit company to refuse to reclaim or stop running their products even after they're no longer being paid to do so. I'm sure it's very normal to just keep running your service for free when your contract's been terminated. Spending money to continue running cameras that supposedly no one is looking at is definitely not an indicator they are just run by the federal government to spy on everyone and only a wacko conspiracy theorist would think so.
“Teachers are often unaware of the gender distribution of talk in their classrooms. They usually consider that they give equal amounts of attention to girls and boys, and it is only when they make a tape recording that they realize that boys are dominating the interactions. Dale Spender, an Australian feminist who has been a strong advocate of female rights in this area, noted that teachers who tried to restore the balance by deliberately ‘favouring’ the girls were astounded to find that despite their efforts they continued to devote more time to the boys in their classrooms. Another study reported that a male science teacher who managed to create an atmosphere in which girls and boys contributed more equally to discussion felt that he was devoting 90 per cent of his attention to the girls. And so did his male pupils. They complained vociferously that the girls were getting too much talking time. In other public contexts, too, such as seminars and debates, when women and men are deliberately given an equal amount of the highly valued talking time, there is often a perception that they are getting more than their fair share. Dale Spender explains this as follows: “The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence. Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women.” In other words, if women talk at all, this may be perceived as ‘too much’ by men who expect them to provide a silent, decorative background in many social contexts.”
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PBS: Language as Prejudice - Myth #6: Women Talk Too Much (via misandry-mermaid)
Every EVERY women’s studies class I’ve been in has had this problem and failed to address it.
(via iamayoungfeminist)
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